Easier Ways To Open File With

The Open With command makes it possible to open a file with something other than the default app. But if you commonly need to do this with a specific app there are three ways to make it much easier to open the file with that app instead of the default. You could just drag it to the Dock icon for the app, add the app icon to the Finder toolbar, or create a keyboard shortcut.


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Let's say you want to open a file but not with a default app. For instance, here's an image. If I double click it, it opens up in Preview the default app. Now let's say you want to open up it in something different. Like Pixelmator, for instance. I can Control click on it. Choose Open With and then choose the app I want and it will work. But what happens if you need to do that a lot. Like you open up images a lot in Pixelmator or Acorn or something like that. But you don't want to change the default for everything. Because you can Control click and Open With and if you hold down Option key it says Always Open With. So you don't want to do that. You just want to have the option to easily open it in Preview or easily open it in, say, Pixelmator. Well, there are a few ways that you can make this happen.

One is to simply get used to dragging and dropping instead of actually double clicking. So if I were to drag and drop to the Dock I can find Pixelmator and I can make sure it's permanently on the left side of the Dock if I want, and open it up in Pixelmator that way. That's pretty easy. But what if you wanted it to be even easier.

Well, another way you can do it is you can add an application to your Finder toolbar. Let's go to the Applications Folder and let's find Pixelmator here as a good example. Let's then go and drag it up here to this toolbar. The way to do that is to edit the toolbar. So I'm going to Control click on the toolbar. It's a quick way to get to Customize Toolbar. You can also do it through the menu there. Once you're actually editing the toolbar here you can actually drag and drop something from the Finder into the toolbar. So I'll add it right there. So you can see there's more that you can do than just adding this stuff. You can actually add an app from the Finder.

So now I can drag and drop onto it like that. Now it will open up in Pixelmator. So it's even easier because often those icons will be closer than the icons down in the Dock having it up there in the Finder. Now wouldn't it be great if there was a keyboard shortcut. After all you can select a file and you can do Command O to open it up in the default app. What if you could hit Command and something else and open it in the app that you want. Well, it turns out that you can do this.

If you Control click and look here and see Open With you can see Pixelmator is there as a menu item. But you can't add keyboard shortcuts to these context menus. You can only add them here to the Menu Bar. As it turns out, if you look carefully, under File there's an Open With there and there you've got your app. So if I were to create a keyboard shortcut that uses this exact menu item name, so Pixelmator.app, then it should work. So let's try it out.

I'm going to go to System Preferences into Keyboard and then I'm going to go to Shortcuts and I'm going to add a new keyboard shortcut under App Shortcuts. I'm going to hit the plus button here. I'm going to say I want it to work in the Finder because that's really where this is going to be happening. The menu title, and it's got to be exact, matches exactly that. I'm going to do a keyboard shortcut of Command i. You can see it adds Pixelmator.app and it's Command i there.

Now here's where it gets a little tricky. Because if I select this image here. I go to File and then I go to Open With you would expect to find the keyboard shortcut there and you will eventually, I find. But it's not there right now. However the keyboard shortcut still works. I select this file. Command i and it opens up in Pixelmator.

So I'd score these three methods, the drag to the Dock working 100% of the time, it's solid. The toolbar method, solid as well. But the keyboard shortcut maybe has a little finickiness to it but it still seems to work pretty well.

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