The first one, the one that you might expect to apply to all files of the same kind, but which actually applies only to the specific file you are doing this for, is under “Open With” in the context menu that comes up when you right click the file (two finger touch by default on MacBook laptops). When you choose Open With > Other and check the “Always Open With” checkbox, you are only creating an association for the file in question, not for the file format in general.
This to me is confusing.
In order to create the association for the file type and not just a specific file, you need to instead select the “Get Info” entry in the context menu for the file. Then, under “Open with” in the window that comes up, this is where you select the application that will apply to all files of same kind.
Did you try the latter method?
The way Finder sets the default view is equally unintuitive
1) Select any file.
2) Change the app in the "Open with" dropdown.
3) If you want it to apply to all files click the "Change all" button.
For example, I can imagine if there were instead two radio buttons in "Open With": "Always for this file", "Always for this extension". All in one place.
As a result it behaved like that:
- When you opened a file, it opened in the program that created it.
- When there were no such program, you could still open it in another program that claimed to understand these files. I don't remember how it was implemented, I think there was a dialog asking if one would like to use another program with some choice (probably the first one that fit).
This was rather handy with formats like "Encapsulated Postscript" in desktop publishing: this format supported both vector and raster images, but one normally used different applications to manipulate them.
This stayed for some time after the move to Mac OS X, but now I believe these things are gone or not used at all.
This is orthogonal to all that, though. It's about the UX to associate an app with a file type, regardless of how that file type is determined.
GNU/Linux doesn't automatically choose which program to use for anything (you can't ./file.png like you can in Windows). In my experience file managers tend to use file extensions to choose which application to use, and that application might then use libmagic and ignore the file extension. (e.g. giving a PNG file the .JPG extension will make the file manager think it's a JPEG, and therefore open it with an image viewer, but the image viewer program will use headers to recognise it as a PNG)
Yes Apple, I really do need to boot up a full blown, 7GB+ sized IDE to edit some markdown. Apparently TextEdit wasn't good enough.
Yeah, I know. If you want good UX, best to switch to living in the 1990s.
Set it up accordingly, you won't go back.
Acme under OSX shines.
Fucking love the concept, but it'd take a lot of work to get the immersiveness of modern systems. e.g. completion/suggestions, linting, etc. none of it is built for plan9.
Ironic because plan9 is amazingly trackball friendly.
https://github.com/jmigpin/editor
It diverges somehow from Acme, but it has autocomplete and a similar interface. I love it :)
https://github.com/moretension/duti
(or `brew install duti`)