Open With to show all application

[mgonto]

Hi,

Sometimes I want to open a no extension file (for example templateMine) with Sublime Text Editor. When I look for the file with QuickSilver and then choose Open With, Sublime is not shown. I think this has to do with the fact that the list only has the preferred applications.

Can I change this somehow? Is this hardcoded?

Thanks!

[skurfer]

This is related to #1087.

Can I change this somehow? Is this hardcoded?

Yes it's hard-coded, but that doesn't mean you can't change it. It's open source after all. :-)

Short term, there are a couple of ways to work around this. One way is to go in the opposite direction (Sublime Text ⇥ Open File… ⇥ [select the file]), but that isn't convenient if the file is already selected. Another option:

1. Select Sublime Text in the first pane and copy it with ⌘C
2. Select your file in the first pane
3. Select the Open With… action in the second pane
4. When presented with the list of applications, go to the third pane and paste with ⌘V

To make that less cumbersome, you're probably better off creating a trigger for Quicksilver Selection ⇥ Open With… ⇥ Sublime Text. That way, with a file selected, you can just hit a special keystroke for Sublime Text. You could also scope this trigger to only be active in Quicksilver so you don't have to worry about finding an available keystroke that doesn't conflict with other applications.

Long term, I'm not sure what the solution is. Some possibilities:

• Contact the developers of Sublime Text and ask them to advertise its ability to open all supported file types. (I'm guessing if you right-click the file in Finder, Sublime Text doesn't show up under the Open With menu there either.) You can probably hack this yourself by messing with Info.plist inside the application's bundle.
• We could add a list of "universal" apps to the preferences, so users could augment the list of apps that they want to be able to use on any file. This is unlikely to happen as the other developers prefer to reduce (not increase) the available preferences.
• We could make an educated guess and assume that any application that knows how to open text, or HTML, or executables, or some type like that probably also knows how to open files with no extension and add them to the list for those files. But that seems like a hacky work-around when Sublime Text should really be advertising the types it supports to fix it system-wide. I actually used to argue against this, but the reasons no longer apply as Apple has fixed it in Finder.

[jeffcox]

The issue at the heart of this is that you can't associate another application with extensionless files through conventional means. You can however use RCDefaultApp to change the association of the MIME type text/plain, as seen here.

[pjrobertson]

I think it would be sensible to have open with… show all files.

Currently there is no easy way for us to get a list of applications that Quicksilver has indexed. We plan on improving the way Quicksilver deals with different types of files (using UTIs) so once we have implemented that, this will be an easy fix.