Is there an Application that reviews the “open with” setting for every file extension and sets it to something sensible or default?
My PDF files somehow got set to open with TextEdit. I think it was set to “Preview” before but I’m unsure. Since I’m unsure, I prefer to let the system or an application with a central database of extensions to application associations decide which installed application is best for opening each extension.
I can always change it later with option-right-click or the file info screen. This request is to do that but in a batch operation. i.e. all of the file types in one go!
Could an AI agent do this? I have zero AI tools installed outside of Apple Intelligence, but I’m open to suggestions.
In case you are not aware, when you use the Get Info on a file, you can change the default application to open that file type and apply that setting to all files of the same type (file extension).
I suspect that having an application do this for you across all installed file types is a bit more than any typical macOS user needs. At a power user level, I certainly agree that an AI agent could be tasked to do what you want. But … unless you are willing to accept the possibility of a general muck up or mayhem in leaving your list of applications to some autopilot mode … why not just handle each case as the need arises?
I’ll check this out. It might solve the problem where you install and application and it “takes over” a bunch of file types by updating the system database, without asking!
Then you have to find what it changed and change them back. Jetbrains recently did this for markdown files. I use VS Code as my markdown editor, but Jetbrains (goland ) decided it was the rightful ruler of markdown ( and json, and html, and… it was greedy ).
and give the copy to Claude (or other) and ask it to see if any apps have registered themselves as the editor for file types that don’t seem to be the best editorial fit for that app.