How to Remove Duplicate App Names from Right-Click Open-With Menu [Mac]

Recently I faced a strange problem where I could see the duplicate entries of some software names when I used to open a file by using the “Open With” feature present in Context Menu on my MacBook Pro. Though this behaviour doesn’t cause any malfunctioning in the Mac operating system but still some people find it annoying and they want to get cleaned such duplicate listing of applications.

Mac OS X provides us different ways to open the Context Menu. We can either perform a right-click on a file to open it or we can also map the keypad taps to get there. Under the Context menu different options are available, like Open, Open with, Get Info, Move to Trash, Copy, Share, Duplicate, etc etc. Among these the most common functions people use, according to my analysis, are Copy and Open With.

“Open With” feature lists different programs / software / applications which can be used to open the targeted file. Due to some wrong entries in the registry, which are not created or deleted programmatically, sometimes we could see more than one time the name of a app in this “Open With” menu.

Delete Duplicate Entries of A App in “Open with” Context Menu:

Step 1:

First of all shut down your mac machine and then start it again. This single step will repair the stuck entries in most of the cases. But in case you still see the same problem, you could follow the below mentioned step in which you have to enter a command in the Terminal.

Step 2:

If step 1 doesn’t solve your problem, open Terminal. The easiest trick to fire up Terminal, among different ways available to launch it, is to use Spotlight. You can either click on the magnifying glass icon present in the top right corner of menu bar or use “Command+Spacebar” keyboard shortcut to bring out spotlight. Now type “Terminal’ in the search box and click on the terminal app to open it.

Step 3:

In the Terminal, type this command and hit Enter.

Important: (Get the code from here as our site automatically inserts the spaces in the code to fit it in the body of the article.)

Step 4:

Now either restart your mac PC or relaunch the Finder only. The latter is easy and fast method to get recognized the changes you made in above step. For this purpose, keep pressed Option (alt) key on keyboard and then click on “Finder” icon in the dock. You will see “Relaunch” option in the pop-out menu. Click on it to reflect new changes.

The Benefit of Removing Duplicate App Names:

The duplicate entries in the context menu don’t mean that there are duplicate software in the applications or in any other folder. These are just entries. Cleaning up the “Open with” menu will help you select the appropriate app instead of getting confused which app to click on and which app not to click on.

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