How To Choose Which App Will Open a File On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to open a file on your Mac in the app that you want. 

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Now when you go to open a file on your Mac the most common way to do it is to double click on the file in the Finder and it will open up in the default app for that file. So, for instance, if you double click on a Pages document it will open up in Pages. But sometimes you want to open up a file in a different app. Well there are many ways to choose which app you want to open up a file. Let's start with the most straight forward. 

Say I've got a file here like this image file. If I double click on it it opens up in Preview, the default app handling these jpeg images. But instead I want to open it up in a 3rd party app like Pixelmator Pro. The simplest way to handle that is to bring up the Context Menu. So instead of double clicking you can click with the Control key held down on your keyboard, use two-fingers on a trackpad or right click on a mouse. I'm going to use Control and then a regular click on this photo. You can see I get Open which will do the same thing as double clicking on the file. But Open With will give you a list of apps over here to the right. This is a list of all the apps that have told macOS that it can handle this type of file. So in some cases these are just viewers. For instance you'll notice all the different browsers here. They'll just allow you to view the file. But others are actual image editors. Notice at the top here I've got the default app, again the one that would work with the Open command or just a double click. But let's open up in Pixelmator Pro in this case. I'll just indicate that by selecting it from this menu and it uses that app instead of the default Preview. 

There's another way to get to this same menu. With the file selected you can go to File and then look for Open With. Here you'll see the same list here. Note that in both cases not only do you get the default and all these other apps that have indicated that they handle this type of file, but you can also select Other. Other will take you to your Applications Folder here. It will show those same apps again but you could also select All Applications. So you could indicate that you want to use a non-standard application to open this type of file. Usually you wouldn't want to do that but every once in a while the application won't show that it handles that type of file when it actually does. So you can actually get to it this way. Also notice you can choose App Store and actually go to The Mac App Store and it will show you search results of apps that will handle this type of file. So if you can't find any app that will open this type of file using this option here may reveal one that you can add to your Mac. 

Now another way to do it is to simply Drag and Drop. You can Drag and Drop to a variety at different locations that indicate that you want to open a file up with an app. For instance you can Drag and Drop to the Dock. So I've got the Dock here at the bottom. It is set to only appear if I bring my pointer down there. Now if I were to Drag this image to the Dock I can move it over that different icons and it will indicate, by highlighting, which one can be used to open this file. Now in some cases it's open as a Viewer, like for instance Safari. In other cases, like in Mail here, it showing it can import this so I can attach it to an email message. 

But let's say I do want to occasionally want to open images in a third party app. I can add that app to the Dock for easy access. So in the Finder I'm going to open up a new Finder window and I'm going to go to the Application's folder and I'm going to find the app that I want to add to the Dock. If I'm going to be using this app on a regular basis I'd probably want it in the Dock anyway. I'm going to Drag it down here and stick it on the Left side of the Dock with the other applications. So I'll stick it right here next to Photos. There is Pixelmator Pro. So now it is there in the Dock I can open up this image or any image file in Pixelmator Pro by dragging it into the Dock over Pixelmator Pro, dropping it onto it and it does the same thing as Open With in choosing Pixelmator Pro. 

You could also just drag directly to an application. So I can create a new Finder window. I go to the Applications Folder. I'll just click it here on the left under Favorites and I can look for an application that I want to use and I can Drag and Drop right to the application itself in the Application's Folder. 

There is a third way to Drag and Drop that a lot of people don't know about. If you already have the Application open, and I've got Pixelmator Pro running here even though I've got no windows open for it, I can Drag and Drop into the Application Switcher. So I'm going to start dragging this file here but I'm not going to release. I still have my thumb down on my trackpad. So I'm just in the middle of dragging I'm going to use my other hand to use Command Tab to bring up the App Switcher. I continue to hold the Command key down just as you would normally use the App Switcher and tab between the applications. But I'm actually not going to pay any attention to which one I have selected. Instead I'm going to drag the file right there into the application in the App Switcher and it will open up with that application. 

Now another way to open up a file in the app is to simply start in the app. So I've got Pixelmator Pro running here and I can do File and then Open right from the app. Usually it is Command O for the shortcut. Then I can navigate to where the file is. You can always quickly get anywhere by simply dragging and dropping either a folder to this Open Dialogue or the file itself which will go to the same place but notice that the file is selected. Then I can just press Enter or Return to open or click the open button right there and it opens it up. So you can always start inside the app and use the File Open command. 

Now what happens if you want to open all your images all the time in a specific app. So, for instance, let's take a text file here. If I double click on that it will open up in TextEdit as you would expect. That's the default app. I can Control click on it or right click or two-finger click and choose Open With and choose something else, like Cot Editor here. But what if I wanted to make Cot Editor the default app for this file. Well I can do it a couple of ways. One is I can go into the Open With menu. I can do it either here or in the File Menu. If I hold the Option Key down notice that Open With changes to Always Open With.  Now I can select Cot Editor. It will open up just like before but now all I need to do after that is double click on that file and it remembers that it is supposed to open up in that app. You could always go back in and change it back to the default app. Note that this only changes things for this one file. If I go to another text file, like this one right here, and I look at Open With the default is still TextEdit for this one. It's only been changed for this specific file. 

But what if I wanted to change this for all Text files or for all jpeg files. Well you can do that. The trick is to select the file and then go to File, Get Info or Command I. This brings up the info window for that file. Notice here it shows Open With and it shows what it is set to. So you could easily change it here. I can go back to TextEdit or I can set it to any specific app I want. Just like before. But when I change it I can also click this Change All button here. So what this will do is it will change all files with the .txt extension to open up using My Custom App. So I'll click Change All to warn me. I'll say okay. Now if I go to another file, like this one here, and I double click on it, notice that opens up in Cot Editor as well. I've changed it for all text files. You can also undo it the same way.

So here's one last tip. You can actually set a keyboard shortcut to open a file with something. It's a pretty easy technique because remember you can set a custom keyboard shortcut for anything that appears in the Menu Bar. So select a file like, say, this jpeg image here. We go to File and then Open With we can see the names of these apps here. So let's say we want to set a custom keyboard shortcut for opening images in Pixelmator Pro. Notice that the menu is Pixelmator space Pro dot app. So if we now go System Settings and then to Keyboard and then to Keyboard Shortcuts and then we go to App Shortcuts, press the Plus button to create a Custom one. Let's set the application to Only in Finder since that is the only place we'll be doing this, and then type the menu name exactly as we saw it. So it will be Pixelmator space Pro dot app and then do a keyboard shortcut. Let's do Control Option Command P, like that. Then Done. We'll close System Settings there. Now notice if I were to select a File like that and go to File and then Open With, Pixelmator Pro has that keyboard shortcut set for it. So we can confirm that it's worked. If you don't see it there that means you spelled the name of the Menu item wrong. So let's go ahead and then use this Keyboard Shortcut and you can see it opens up that file in Pixelmator Pro where a double click is going to open up in the default app, Preview. 

So this should give you complete control now over which app you're using to open up any file in any situation. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.