A while back I wrote a post on the Jamf Tech Thoughts blog about managing the default browser on macOS. In that post I introduced a script using JXA to set the default application for a given url scheme. (like http, mailto, ssh etc.) The beauty of using JXA/osascript is that it doesn’t require the installation of an extra tool.
However, there was a follow-up comment asking about default apps for file types, i.e. which app will open PDF files or files with the .sh file extension. Unfortunately, Apple has not bridged those AppKit APIs to AppleScript/JXA, which means it is not possible to use them in a script without dependencies.
Back then, I started working on a command line tool which uses those APIs. I didn’t really plan to publish it, since there were established tools, like duti, cdef and SwiftDefaultApp that provided the functionality. It was a chance to experiment and learn more about Swift Argument Parser. Then life and work happened and other projects required more attention.
A recent discussion on the Mac Admins Slack reminded me of this. Also, none of the above mentioned tools have been updated in the past years. As far as I can tell, none of them have been compiled for the Apple silicon platform. They don’t provide installation pkgs either, which complicates their distribution in a managed deployment.
So, I dusted off the project, cleaned it up a bit, and added a ReadMe file and a signed and notarized installation pkg. The tool is called utiluti (I am a bit proud of that name).
You can use utiluti to set the default app for an url scheme:
$ utiluti url set mailto com.microsoft.Outlook set com.microsoft.Outlook for mailto
or to set the default app to open a uniform type identifier (UTI):
$ utiluti type set public.plain-text com.barebones.bbedit set com.barebones.bbedit for public.plain-text
There are bunch of other options, you can read the details in the ReadMe or in the command line with utiluti help.
The functionality is quite basic, but please provide feedback if there are features you’d like to have added.
This is cool! Can it be wrapped in a GUI that would display the defaults and allow them to be changed? That’d be very handy for my Windows savvy team in helping our Mac users.
Can it? Sure. But I am not planning one. GUI apps are an order of magnitude more effort to build and maintain and even though they are a bit cumbersome, macOS already has UI to set default apps.