duti

duti

set default apps for file types and URL schemes

curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- duti

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Add --prefix /usr/local/bin to
put it somewhere else, or --uninstall to remove it.

Why it’s here

No dependency problem to solve — it’s here so it installs the same way as everything else.

Details

Built from that exact tarball, with its SHA-256 pinned in the
recipe. The binary links against nothing outside /usr/lib
and /System/, checked in CI before release.

Sets the default application for a file type or URL scheme on macOS.

macOS gives you Finder’s Get Info dialog and nothing else: one file type
at a time, by hand, with no way to script it or check it into a
dotfiles repo. duti is the command-line equivalent.

# What opens .txt files at the moment?
duti -x txt

# What handles this UTI?
duti -d public.html

# Set a default: bundle id, UTI, role
duti -s com.microsoft.VSCode public.plain-text all

# A URL scheme takes two arguments and no role
duti -s com.google.Chrome https

# Or apply a whole file of them
duti ~/.duti

The settings file is one bundle-id uti-or-extension role per line,
which is the reason most people install this — a machine’s file
associations become something you can keep in version control and
re-apply after a rebuild.

Roles are viewer, editor, shell or all. man duti has the full
set, including -l to list handlers for a UTI.

Install

./install.sh                      # into ~/.local/bin
./install.sh --prefix /usr/local/bin
./install.sh --uninstall

About this build

There is no dependency story here — Homebrew’s duti has no runtime
dependencies either. This is packaged so it installs the same way as
everything else, and because macOS ships nothing equivalent.

What it does do better is newer macOS. Upstream stopped in 2018, and
its configure carries a hardcoded list of Darwin versions that
refuses to build on anything past macOS 10.13. Homebrew carries five
backported patches, each one appending another version to that list,
plus a further edit at install time because the patches keep falling
behind. This build takes the version check out instead and passes the
SDK explicitly, so it isn’t waiting on anyone to patch it for the next
macOS.

Two small things upstream’s release process would have filled in, which
a build straight from the git tag misses: duti -V reports the real
1.5.4 here rather than INTERNAL, and the man page header shows the
release date rather than a literal _DUTI_BUILD_DATE.

The binary links ApplicationServices, CoreFoundation and
CoreServices, all part of macOS, so there is nothing else to install.

dutis, included

dutis is installed alongside
duti. It’s a separate, actively developed Rust tool built on top of
it: an interactive picker, a declarative config with
plan/diff/apply, snapshots and rollback, and drift detection.

dutis                      # interactive mode
dutis get txt              # what opens .txt files?
dutis doctor               # check it can find duti
dutis plan dutis.toml      # what a config would change

It reads Launch Services directly, but it makes every change by
running duti, which is why both come in one package here rather than
dutis needing a separate install first. dutis --help and each
command’s --help are its documentation; there’s no man page.

dutis-event-http, an optional helper that forwards dutis’s events to
an HTTPS endpoint, is included too, as it is in upstream’s own
packaging.

One limitation belongs to dutis itself: dutis launch-agent sets up a
background watcher under launchd, and launchd’s PATH doesn’t include
~/.local/bin. A watcher that only reports drift is fine, but one
that tries to fix it won’t find duti. The same is true of
Homebrew’s /opt/homebrew/bin.

Upstream

• duti: https://github.com/moretension/duti/, version 1.5.4, public
  domain (see LICENSE)
• dutis: https://github.com/tsonglew/dutis, version 2.24.0, MIT (see
  LICENSE-dutis)

duti is Andrew Mortensen’s work, released into the public domain. dutis
is Tsonglew’s. unflab only compiles and packages them.