▲ 13 r/MacOS
macOS still has no good way to manage file associations globally, so I made a tool
Hi all,
I’ve always found macOS file association management weirdly painful.
In daily use, I don’t want everything opened by the same app:
- Markdown → Typora
- Code → VS Code / Cursor
- Simple JSON / TXT / shell files → something lightweight like Sublime Text or CotEditor
- Images → sometimes Preview, sometimes Photoshop / Pixelmator
But macOS still doesn’t offer any kind of central view for this.
You basically have to go through:
Right click → Get Info → Open with → Change All...
…for one file type at a time, over and over.
There’s also no easy way to answer things like:
- what app is currently opening
.json? - which app claimed a bunch of extensions?
- why things get messy after uninstalling certain apps
So I ended up building a small tool called OpenWith.
It’s a lightweight macOS terminal UI (TUI), built in Rust, that lets you:
- view file-extension associations in one place
- see which app is currently the default
- quickly change default apps
- avoid digging through Finder or remembering bundle IDs
It’s fast and minimal, and fits nicely into a dev workflow.
I originally built it just for myself, but I figured others here might run into the same frustration.
Would love any feedback.
u/Immediate_Fall_3457 — 15 hours ago