I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?

As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.

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bandrami 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

XCode re-associates its preferred filetypes every time you update it, or at least pretty reliably does for me

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nerdsniper 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.

I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.

This has driven me to madness too.

	▲	dwaite an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive. They are the same Info.plist format as every other MacOS application.
	▲	c-fe 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		select in finder the file that currently opens with XCode, then press Cmd+i. It opens the information panel. There in the Open with section, you can chose the app and then also Change all to not use XCode.
	▲	crazygringo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not something I've ever experienced. Open As... Always works just fine.

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gloosx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Not once has it ever changed on me.

I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.

Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.

For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.

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cyrusradfar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.

I know the procedure.

The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.

It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.

The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.

Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.

As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.

Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.

I failed at that today. Please forgive me.