Customizing the Mac Context Menu

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at customizing the Context Menu on your Mac.

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So the Context Menu is the name of the menu that you get when you either Control Click, right click with a Mouse, or two-finger click with a trackpad on something on your screen. For instance here in the Finder I can Control Click on a file, like this one. This brings up the Context Menu. It's called this because what is shown here depends on the context. What it is that you're clicking, which app you're using, and other factors. 

For instance, in Pages here if I Control Click on a word then I get various things here. Like Look Up, Translate, Copy, Paste and all of that. But if I were to Control Click on an image I get a different set of options here in the Context Menu. The context has changed depending upon where I was when I clicked it. Likewise you'll get different things here in a web browser. For instance Control clicking on a Link brings up this. Control clicking on an image brings up other options. 

So a common question is how can you customize this Menu. So if I Control Click here on this file in the Finder here's what I get. Now suppose I don't want all of these options. Or maybe I think of something else that I do want to have here. Well, most of these cannot be customized. They are determined by the app you're using. In this case the app is the Finder. But in the other example it was Pages and Safari. The App determines the main items that you see here. It picks them based on what it is that you're clicking. Note that most of these, often all of them, are available also here in the Menu. So if you see something here, like for instance here's Get Info, Rename, Compress. I could also find them up here by selecting the file and then going to File Menu I could see Get Info, Rename, Compress as well as others that I would see in the Context Menu. 

This is useful to know because often people ask, how can I create a keyboard shortcut to the Context Menu. Like let's say I want to Get Info a lot on a file. I don't want to have to Control Click then move my pointer to Get Info and select it. But you don't have to. If you've got the file selected Get Info is right here in the File Menu with Command i as the keyboard shortcut. You never had to bring up the Context Menu in the first place. There's no need for a Keyboard shortcut to bring up the Context Menu and then activate the command. You can just have that keyboard shortcut that activates the command. For things that don't have keyboard shortcuts, of course you can always go to System Preferences and then Keyboard and then Shortcuts and under Add Shortcuts you can add your own keyboard shortcuts for those menu items.

Now while you can't customize most of the things here there are a few places where you can. One of those is Share. If you go to the Share Menu you'll see various different options here and you can actually customize these. You can even see how to do it right here under More. Select More and it's going to take you to System Preferences, Extensions, to the Share Menu. Here I can select what is allowed in the Share Menu. Not everything is going to appear for every Context Menu. Some of these things don't make sense according to the context. But you can further control things by removing things. For instance if you don't want to have Notes as an option you can just remove it right here. See it drops it here to the bottom. Now notice when I bring up the Context Menu and go to Share, Notes isn't an option anymore. So I can clean this out a bit.

Now you can't add items into here. That has to be done by the app. The app itself needs to create the hooks in the Operating System to be allowed here in Extension's Share Menu. You can't just simply create that on your own. The App developer had to do it when creating the app. Now note that whatever you customize for the Context Menu Share also appears here in the Share Menu. There, you can see you get the same options. You can also get them, usually, by going to File, Share.

Now the next part of the Context Menu you can customize is Quick Actions. So Quick Actions here offers a few different things that you can do with the item you have selected. Sometimes they are from Shortcuts, sometimes they are from other things. For instance if I were to select an image file like this one, Control Click it and go to Quick Actions you'll see a few built-in things like Convert Image, Create PDF, Markup, and Rotate. These are included in the Operating System in addition to these three shortcuts that you've added. Now if I go to Customize here it's going to take me to System Preferences, Extensions, and then for Finder, since Finder is the app I'm using, it will show me all of these extensions that hook in and I can notice that these are all the things I see here in the Context Menu under Quick Actions. So, I can remove some of these if I want. Like if I don't want to see Create PDF I can get rid of it and you can see it drops there to the bottom. It will also show me the shortcuts that I have. You can see the three here but there are others that are eligible to possibly be in this Quick Actions menu but they are not turned on. Now you can do that here but you could also do that in the Shortcuts App. So, for instance, I can go here into this shortcut and under Settings I have Use As Quick Action. So I can turn that On or Off here as well when working directly with the Shortcut. So that is how you would customize the Quick Action section here. 

Now under Quick Actions there is another section called Services. It doesn't say Services here but there are four different services. If I were to go and use an image file, notice instead of four items it says Services. Why? Well, because four is the limit. If there is more than four it's going to tuck them all into a submenu called Services. Now notice these are usually added by the app. So here I've got two apps.  BBEdit and CotEditor both of which have added services to the Finder that appear here. If I look at images, I've got those plus a set of Desktop Picture which is added by the System. Now you can customize this as well. You can't get to it from the menu there but if you go to System Preferences and then Keyboard then go to Shortcuts then you'll see Services here. Now this is primarily used to assign keyboard shortcuts to Services. But the checkboxes here determine whether or not they appear in the Context Menu as well. So, for instance, there's that Compare Using BBEdit. I can see that here if I use a Pages document and there it is. Now if I turn that Off notice it goes away. Notice that Services appear also under the Application Menu, Services. You'll see a bunch of them here. Typically you'll see a lot more of them here. There are more here because it's not looking at those checkboxes anymore. Also if you don't have anything selected, I'll deselect this, then that changes the Context as well and you'll see different things under Services depending upon that. Notice you can get, in System Preferences, right to this from the Services Menu here. This is also where you could assign keyboard shortcuts to these because anyone of these appears in the menu so you can go here and set a keyboard shortcut for that item right here. That way you can skip using the Context Menu completely by having a keyboard shortcut in the Services Menu in the main menu bar. 

Now adding things to the Services Menu is also kind of like Quick Actions. First for an app it has got to have the hooks already there. You can't force it but you can create your own services in the Shortcuts app which I showed you before. Of course you are limited to what you can do for that. So you can't just dream up anything and then have it here. It has to be something that you can build using the Shortcuts app. You could also use the Script to Editor app and Automator to build Services. But that is going to require some programming skills. 

Some more things about the Context Menu. Like with the regular menu bar you can hold the Option Key sometimes and you'll get new items and things will change. You can do the same thing with the Context Menu. If I bring this up here and I hold Option notice how some of these items change to do slightly different things. Even under Quick Actions notice how Rotate Left change to Rotate Right with the Option key. The Context Menu is definitely one of the skills you should try to master as a Mac user. So many times when you're looking for a way to do something the answer is simply Control click, right click or two-finger click on the item, and then the action is right there in the Context Menu. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.