Leopard global ‘Open file with’ setting

Apple Mac OS X 10.5, nicely called Leopard, is one of the best operating systems I had chance to work with. The others are Tiger and Panther, 10.4 and 10.3 respectively. You see a pattern here, and although I am very fond of XP and actually kind of like Vista, I’m not an MS fan. But I acknowledge the pros and cons of each of them. One irritating thing Leopard has is that when you select a document to open with a specific application, then even though you choose to always open it with that app, it doesn’t propagate to all documents of that kind. Unlike in systems from Redmond, you have to change that property in the document’s info. I’ll show you where it is.

First, you have to find the document of the kind that you want to open with a particular application. Say you want to set that .doc files are always opened with NeoOffice, instead of the default TextEdit (check the Easter Egg in Wiki entry, btw). When you view its information window, either by clicking right button and selecting Get info or using the shortcut +I, you should see something like this:

From the Open with section, select the application of your choice — NeoOffice in this case. The Change all button will become enabled, and when you click it and confirm the dialog, all documents of the same kind will from now on be opened using NeoOffice.

And that’s it. The mini icon of the document will change, and all other documents of that type will have their icon changed after the next system restart.