How To Create a Keyboard Shortcut To Open a File In a Specific App

Sometimes just having one default app to open a file type isn't enough. With documents like images and text files, you often open files in different apps in different situations. Instead of using the context menu to open the document, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to open the document in a specific app.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create keyboard shortcuts to open documents with specific apps.
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So here's a problem I often run into myself. I've got documents that can be opened in multiple apps. For instance, here's an image file, here's a text file. If I were to double click on the image file it would open up with Preview. But I have a lot of image editing apps. If I Control click or right finger click on a mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad to bring up the Context Menu I could go to Open With and you could see the long list of apps I have that can handle image files. Most of these should be familiar to you. Things like PhotoShop. There's Affinity Photo. There's Pixelmator Pro. Now some of these I rarely ever use to open up images, like web browsers for instance. But I often use either Acorn, Affinity Photo, or Pixelmator Pro to open up images and setting a default with the Option key so always Open With is now the Option and setting it to something like Affinity Photo doesn't make sense because sometimes I'm going to want to open it up in this app or this app or even back to Preview.
There's a similar situation here with a text file. Double click on that and it opens up in TextEdit by default. If I Control click on it I can see all the apps that handle text files. I very often use either this or this app to open up the text file. The default is fine but I use these two apps often enough that I want to have an easier way to open it than go into the Context Menu and then Open With and then selecting one of them.
So to set your own keyboard shortcut the Menu item needs to appear somewhere in one of the menus. You would think that this wouldn't be the case when you're trying to open up a file with a custom app. But it is! If you've got the file selected and you go to File, there's Open With. You could see the same choices here as you get in the Context Menu including the same apps spelled out perfectly here in the Menu. As long as you know exactly what the letters are in the Menu item you can set a keyboard shortcut for it. So let's go and create keyboard shortcuts to open images in Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photos, and Acorn.
First let's figure out what those shortcuts could be. Fortunately, I only need to set these shortcuts for the Finder so I don't need to worry about conflicting with keyboard shortcuts in other apps. The only time I would ever use this is when I'm selecting the File in the Finder. So if I look in the Finder menus here I get an idea of what keyboard shortcuts are already in use. You could see almost all of them use the Command key. So you've got various Command and a letter. Sometimes Shift Command and a letter. Or sometimes Option Command and a letter. So I can think maybe I could use the Control key instead. So maybe something like Shift Control and then a letter. Maybe A for Acorn, F for Affinity Photo, and P for Pixelmator Pro.
Now let's go to the Apple Menu, System Preferences and then go to Keyboard. Then I'm going to go to Shortcuts. Then jump to App Shortcuts. Here's where you can set Custom Shortcuts for any Menu item. Use the Plus button here and change the Application to only be the Finder. Then I'm going to set the menu title. So the Menu Titles for all those were straight forward. So, for instance, Pixelmator Pro and let's set the keyboard shortcut here to Shift and Control and P. I'll add it. Let's add the other two as well. I'll do Acorn and I'll do Shift and Control and A. Then Affinity Photo and Shift Control F. So now you can see I've got those three added there. So let's close System Preferences and check to make sure they're set properly. So I'll select an image file here and then I'll go to File, Open With, and I'll see here there's the keyboard shortcut for Acorn, Affinity Photo, and Pixelmator Pro.
Now let's try them out. Let's use the first one here and you could see it works fine. Do the second one and you could see that works too although Affinity Photo does take awhile to launch. I'll try the third one and that works fine too. So now I've got three keyboard shortcuts I can use rather than having to navigate through the Context Menu to get there. I could add more if I wanted to add PhotoShop to that as well I can easily add that as a fourth shortcut.
Let's do it for text files here. If I select this text file. I go to File, Open With and I can see these two items right here. Let's add those. System Preferences, Keyboard, Shortcuts, App Shortcuts. So let's add this one. Remember to set this to Finder. Then the name of the menu and then I'll add this one. We'll quit System Preferences and now I can still double click on this file to open TextEdit, the default app, but Shift Control B will open it up in BBEdit and Shift Control C will open it up in CotEditor. Notice when I have that file selected and I go to Open With I only have those two options here because those other keyboard shortcuts are for apps that won't appear in this list when a text file is selected. Likewise if I select this file here and I go to the Open With submenu I don't see those other two apps. So I only get these three keyboard shortcuts here. Technically if an app handled both kinds of files, like if I set one for Firefox here handles both, then I would see the same keyboard shortcut for images and for text files.
Also notice if I Control click on the file and go to Open With these appear here as well. So it's a nice indicator to be able to see and remind yourself that you've got these keyboard shortcuts set after you set them and a few weeks later you kind of forget you did that every time you go to the Open With menu you'll see them there and remember that you could just use the keyboard shortcuts to do this.
So if you're having trouble with this technique one of the first things to suspect is maybe you have a conflict between that keyboard shortcut and something that's a default keyboard shortcut in the Finder. So try another keyboard shortcut. The other thing to suspect is maybe you made a mistake when you typed the name of the app. If you put an extra space in here it won't work. This doesn't match. Or maybe you made a spelling mistake in typing out the menu item. So double and triple check the menu item to make sure it's exact. Also, of course, make sure that you've got the file selected for this to work. It needs to know what file you want to open. That's kind of the first thing. The second thing is what app to open it with.
Now note you can have a file selected, like right now, but also have a window that's actually the frontmost window. So if I open a new Finder window here you could see it's still show this file selected on the Desktop but this window is at the front. So if I look here under File you'll see Open With is grayed out. I haven't selected anything in the frontmost window. But on the other hand if I do select something in the frontmost window like that, then you could see Open With is there and it has those keyboard shortcuts since this is a text file. The same thing is true if you have a completely different app open. You've got this selected but the open app is Notes. So, of course, you don't even have an Open With menu here. So it can be confusing if your eye is just looking at this file, it looks selected, and then you try to use your keyboard shortcut to open it. It's not opening it. It's actually acting on the frontmost app which in this case is Notes.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Keyboard Shortcuts (49 videos)
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