Macos – Access Finder’s “Open With” menu from the commandline (for tab completion)

bashcommand linemacostab completionzsh

On Mac OS X, I know one can open a file from the commandline with its default application with open, and with other applications with open -a <application name>. Thus,

open movie.avi
open -a VLC movie.avi
open movie.avi -a VLC

all work. My only complaint is that when I type

open movie.avi -a <TAB>

it completes over all applications that exist on the computer — for instance in zsh I get

zsh: do you wish to see all 793 possibilities (200 lines)?

— while what I would like is for it to complete over only the handful of applications that Finder's "Open With" menu would have shown.

So is there a way to access this list that Finder knows, and make my shell (zsh, but I can switch to bash if it helps) aware of the list, in such a way that tab completion would show only those applications?

Best Answer

AllApplications

$ AllApplications -h

Created 03 March 2011 by Hank McShane
version 0.1
requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher

Use this command line tool to get the path to all applications that can open a file from Launch Services.

Usage: AllApplications -path path/to/file

$ ext=png; f=/tmp/allapps.$ext; touch $f; AllApplications -path $f; rm $f
/Applications/Preview.app
/2/copies/Safari.app
/Applications/TeX/LaTeXiT.app
/Applications/WebKit.app
/Applications/Sequential.app
/Applications/ImageOptim.app
/Applications/Acorn.app
/Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Core Image Fun House.app
/2/copies/Preview.app
/Developer/Applications/Dashcode.app
/Applications/GraphicConverter.app
/Applications/Google Chrome.app
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS5/Adobe Photoshop CS5.app
/Applications/Utilities/QuickTime Player 7.app
/Applications/Utilities/ColorSync Utility.app
/Applications/Safari.app
/Applications/Adobe Device Central CS5/Adobe Device Central CS5.app
/Applications/Firefox.app

duti

$ duti -d public.png
com.apple.Preview
$ duti -l public.png
com.SequentialX.Sequential
com.flyingmeat.Acorn
net.pornel.ImageOptim
com.apple.system-library
com.apple.ColorSyncUtility
com.apple.Preview

(It's missing some apps that are displayed in the open with menu though.)

Related Solutions

Linux – How to turn off or adjust the clever tab completion in Ubuntu (Programmable Completion)

comment out these lines in /etc/bash.bashrc (it may be in ~/.bashrc):

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
 . /etc/bash_completion
fi

Tab completion for command arguments fail in Cygwin due to `.exe` extension

It turns out that there is a configuration option in Cygwin that configures Bash to not include a filename’s .exe extension when it completes the name of a command.

Enabling the completion_strip_exe option (specific to the Cygwin port of Bash) does what I want:

shopt -s completion_strip_exe

This feature is not very obviously documented: it gets a cursory mention in the Pathname Expansion section of the Cygwin man page for Bash (it is not included in the upstream source code so is not documented in the official man page or documentation for Bash). I came across it while perusing /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/bash.README (some 4 months after asking this question):

7b. using 'shopt -s completion_strip_exe' makes completion strip .exe suffixes.

It seems that this option has been available in Cygwin Bash for over 5 years:

----- version 4.1.9-1 -- 2010-12-29 -----
Add EXECIGNORE and completion_strip_exe patches from Dan Colascione.

Further research shows that the patch for this feature was submitted by Dan Colascione back in November 2010 with the following description:

completion_strip_exe is a new shell option. When enabled, bash tries to use the short name of a program instead of its longer ".-exe"-suffixed one. With this on, pin completes to "ping".

Many thanks to Dan Colascione (I've just sent him a personal email to thank him personally) for this feature and the Bash maintainers for providing such a great shell.