Menu Editor Guide

This guide covers how to configure each menu type, what every field in the inspector means, and the part people get stuck on most — display rules.

Just installed and want one working menu first? See Getting Started. Only interested in scripts? See Script Menus.

1. The interface

The main window has three tabs at the top: Context Menu, Status Bar Menu, and Plugin Manager. The first two are both menu editors and work identically — see section 6 for the differences.

Each editor has three panes:

All three dividers can be dragged to resize, and the widths are remembered. The window itself is resizable too.

What’s in the library

Grouped by function:

• New File — blank document templates: Markdown, Excel, AI, CSS and more
• Open With — open the selection in a specific app
• Favorites — jump straight to Downloads, Desktop, Documents…
• Copy To / Move To — send the selection to a location you use often
• Built-in — Copy Path, Cut, New Folder, Copy Filename, Paste Image as PNG, Calculate Total Size
• Scripts — ready-made scripts you can use as-is or edit
• Plugins — menus provided by installed plugins

The search box at the top filters by name.

Adding a menu item

Three ways, same result:

1. Drag it from the left pane to the middle
2. Double-click a template to append it to the end
3. Right-click a template → Add to Menu

While dragging, a blue horizontal line in the middle pane shows where the item will land.

Creating one from scratch (no template)

Nothing in the library fits? Right-click in the middle pane → Add to create a blank one: New File, Copy To…, Move To…, Open Folder, Open With…, Scripts, Submenu, Separator.

Where the new item lands depends on what you right-clicked:

Right-clicking empty space does not clear the current selection. If an item was already selected, the new one still lands next to it — click empty space first to deselect.

The same context menu also has Remove and Reset. Reset only applies to items that came from the library; items you created yourself and group headers show it greyed out.

Reordering, nesting, deleting

• Reorder — drag up and down in the middle pane
• Nest — drop onto a Submenu item to make it a child
• New submenu — right-click in the middle pane → Add → Submenu
• Delete — select and press Delete

Two drop indicators, two meanings:

The highlighted row also shows the name of the item you are dragging, so you can confirm the target.

When changes take effect

Immediately. There is no Save button. As soon as you finish editing a field (text field loses focus, popup selected, checkbox clicked), the change is written and pushed to Finder.

Made a mistake? ⌘Z undoes, ⇧⌘Z redoes.

2. Building your first menu

“Open with Visual Studio Code”, start to finish:

1. Right-click in the middle pane → Add → Open With…
2. The new item is called “Open With…”; on the Basic tab set Title to Open with VS Code
3. Scroll to Open With Configuration:
   • Set Open With to App Name
   • Set Target to Visual Studio Code — the name shown in the Applications folder, without .app
4. Switch to the Display tab and set Show When to Files selected
5. Done. Right-click any file in Finder to try it

The library does contain a whole group of ready-made “Open with X” entries you could drag over and just change the target. We create one from scratch here because it leaves every field for you to fill in — go through them once and you know what each one controls.

If the menu does not appear, see “The context menu doesn’t show up” in the FAQ.

3. Menu types

New File

Creates a new file in the current Finder folder.

• File Template — determines the initial contents. The popup lists every existing template (Shell.sh, Markdown.md and so on)
• Target Extension — leave empty to use the template’s own extension; fill it in to override. If the template is Markdown.md and you enter mdx, you get .mdx. The leading dot is optional — it is added for you
• Open After Create (on the Execute tab) — opens the new file in the default app right away

The three buttons below:

Built-in

Six actions that need no configuration:

Open With

Open With decides how Target is interpreted:

The Choose App… button below Target picks from your installed apps, so you neither type it out nor get it wrong.

Open each file separately (on the Execute tab) — with several files selected, launch a separate instance for each. Almost no app needs this, since most accept multiple files at once; it exists for older programs that only handle one document at a time. It does not apply to System Service and is hidden in that case.

Open Folder / Copy To / Move To

All three need a Target Folder — use the button to pick a directory.

• Open Folder — opens that folder in Finder, regardless of what is selected
• Copy To / Move To — sends the selection there
  • Reveal in Finder (on the Execute tab) — jumps to the target folder and highlights the result when finished

Scripts

The most flexible type. See Script Menus for the full picture; here are the three fields on the Scripts tab:

• Interpreter — what runs the script. A command name (bash, zsh, python3, node) or a full path (/opt/homebrew/bin/python3)
• Environment Variables — one KEY=VALUE per line. Leave empty for the system defaults. Most often used to extend PATH:

  PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:/usr/local/bin
  LANG=en_US.UTF-8

• Script Content — the script itself. Selected file paths arrive as $1, $2… and the working directory is set to the current Finder folder

Note that this tab only exists for the Scripts type — the tab bar reads Basic / Scripts / Display / Execute, four tabs, where other types have three.

The ⓘ next to Interpreter and Environment Variables opens an inline explanation, so you don’t have to come back here.

Plugin

Provided by a plugin; the title and icon follow the plugin. The top of the inspector shows From Plugin: <name>, and Manage this plugin… jumps to the Plugin Manager.

You can still give it its own display rules and execution settings — those are yours and survive plugin updates.

Submenu and Separator

• Submenu — a pure container. No Display or Execute tab, because it does nothing itself
• Separator — a horizontal line. Always shown, unaffected by any rule

4. Inspector fields

The inspector has up to four tabs, depending on the menu type:

Basic

Display

This is the tab worth understanding. It decides when the item appears.

Show When

A single popup that acts as the master switch for every rule below it:

Three things to know:

1. With Always, none of the file or folder conditions apply. If you want to filter by extension, do not choose Always
2. Right-clicking empty space in Finder shows only Always items. Menus like Copy Path, which need a selection, will not appear — that is correct behaviour
3. File conditions and folder conditions are OR’d, not AND’d. With “Files or folders selected”, satisfying either side is enough

File conditions

Entering extensions: one at a time. The leading dot and the letter case are both optional — jpg, .jpg, JPG and .JPG all normalise to jpg, and the list always shows the lowercase dotless form. Adding the same extension twice is ignored.

The dialog behind + adapts to your Name Match choice, giving the right explanation and example for extensions or for regular expressions.

Using regular expressions: matched against the file name only, not the path, and it is a partial match — any part of the name matching is enough. ^IMG_ catches everything starting with IMG_; \.tar\.gz$ catches .tar.gz files.

Min and Max are easy to misread: they count what is left after the earlier conditions have filtered, not the total number of items you selected.

Example: the menu matches extension jpg with Max Selection 1. You select 3 files, only one of which is a JPG. One JPG survives the filter, which satisfies “at most 1”, so the menu appears.

Folder conditions

The same as file conditions, minus “Requires execute permission”.

Extension here means the folder’s own extension — on macOS, .app, .xcodeproj, .bundle and .framework are all folders. To target Xcode projects, choose Extension and enter xcodeproj; no regular expression needed.

When Show When is “Files selected”, the whole Directory section is disabled: Show When is the master switch, and conditions on the side you did not select would have no effect, so the interface greys them out rather than let you fill them in for nothing.

Execute

Privilege:

Notify:

Three more checkboxes live on this tab, each only for one type:

5. Display rules cheat sheet

6. How the Status Bar Menu differs

The Status Bar Menu editor looks the same but differs in three ways:

1. There is no Display tab. The status bar menu opens from the menu bar icon, where there is no “selected file”, so file and folder conditions are meaningless. The inspector has only Basic and Execute (plus Scripts for script items).

2. There is a Shortcut field, under UI Configuration on the Basic tab. Click it, press a combination, and that shortcut runs the item directly without opening the menu.

3. The library only lists groups that do not depend on a selection — Favorites and Plugins. New File, Open With, Copy To and the rest only make sense with files selected, so they are not offered here.

To put a script in the status bar, the library will not help — right-click in the middle pane → Add → Scripts. The right-click Add menu is not filtered and offers all eight types.

Note that a script here cannot read $1: there is no selection when a status bar menu runs.

7. Recipes

Batch-convert selected images to PNG

Type: Scripts

• Show When: Files selected
• Name Match: Extension → jpg jpeg heic webp
• Interpreter: bash
• Script Content:

  for f in "$@"; do
      sips -s format png "$f" --out "${f%.*}.png"
  done

• Notify: System Notification

Open a terminal in the current folder

Type: Scripts

• Show When: Always
• Script Content: open -a Terminal "$PWD"

Stash the selection in an inbox folder

Type: Move To

• Show When: Files or folders selected
• Target Folder: your staging directory
• Check Reveal in Finder

Checksum a single large file

Type: Scripts

• Show When: Files selected
• Min 1, Max 1
• Script Content: shasum -a 256 "$1" | pbcopy
• Notify: System Notification

Edit a system config as administrator

Type: Scripts

• Show When: Files selected
• Privilege: Administrator
• Check Require Confirmation
• Script Content as needed

8. Restoring defaults, and what to check when something is wrong

Restore Defaults

Restore Defaults at the bottom of the middle pane only touches built-in menus:

• Built-in menus you deleted come back
• Built-in menus you changed (renamed, reordered, reconfigured) are reset to factory values
• Everything you added yourself, your own scripts, and plugin menus are left untouched

You are asked to confirm first. Afterwards the undo history is cleared — the items those entries pointed at have been rebuilt, so ⌘Z can no longer bring them back.

The change had no effect

1. Check that Enable is on
2. Check that Show When matches what you actually have selected — by far the most common cause is “Files selected” while right-clicking empty space
3. Check the patterns under Name Match
4. Still stuck? See the FAQ

Too many menus to find anything

Group them into submenus, or turn Enable off for the ones you rarely use — the configuration stays, ready to switch back on.