I’ve been sitting on this one while I got TerminalWidget launched. FileRouter is out — Mac App Store and direct via Paddle (and coming soon to Setapp, give it a couple days) — and I want to tell you what it is before I bury you in feature lists.
You know Choosy or Velja? Double-click a link, pick a browser (or let a rule pick one). FileRouter is that idea for files. Double-click a Markdown note, a text file, whatever you’ve claimed, and it never opens “in FileRouter.” It lands in the editor your rules (or you) pick.
It’s Open With, except you define the cast, the order, and the plot twists.
I know I keep saying this, but all of these apps I’m releasing aren’t what’s slowing the nvUltra release. It’s through the beta and we just need to finish the payment system, which we had to restart because we completely changed the pricing model (pay once and own, pay yearly for updates). ETA October on the outside.
But back to FileRouter.
macOS’s default app is a hammer. One app per type, forever, until you dig through Get Info again. Real life is messier: Drafts notes in one app, blog drafts in another, “just peek” in Marked, and sometimes you want both the editor and the preview.
FileRouter sits in the menu bar, owns the double-click for the types you assign, and routes. You choose which apps show up, in what order, and when the boring default isn’t good enough.
For each file type you can:
Hotkeys work in Finder, and in the Paddle version they also work in Bloom and Path Finder (Forklift isn’t scriptable, but double clicks still work there). You can assign the same hotkey in multiple file types, so that one hotkey can be used to open any kind of file, with each file type having its own handling.
Out of the box FileRouter starts with Markdown and plain text. Drag any other file onto the menu bar item and it can take that UTI — HTML, images, whatever you live in.
By default it offers apps that register as editors. You can also pull in viewers like Marked and Preview, drop apps you never want, and add your own. Prefer Typora above VS Code above TextEdit? Drag the order. Done.
Some apps don’t want a file path — they want a custom URL. nvUltra is the classic example: it thinks in directories, but a URL scheme can open the selected file in its containing folder. In FileRouter you can attach a scheme to an editor so routing passes a URL instead of a plain open.
There’s also FileRouter’s own scheme, x-filerouter://open, for scripts and automations. Point it at a path, optionally force a rule by ID or name — including disabled rules, so you can keep a rule that never fires on double-click and only exists for URL triggers. URL-only rules. Nerdy. Useful.
Help covers the details; the short version is: other tools can hand files to FileRouter without pretending to be a default app.
FileRouter stands on an idea (and early code) from Ralf Hülsmann. I’ve featured his projects for years; this one landed as something of a birthday present when he gifted it to me, and I’m grateful. More of Ralf’s work lives at github.com/rhsev — URL routers for local networks, menu-bar toys, Markdown tooling. Worth a follow.
If you live in Markdown and text all day and you’re tired of one-size-fits-all defaults, give it a spin. Tell a friend who still right-clicks Open With twelve times a week — they might thank you.
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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