Service Station is the Mac app I didn’t know I was waiting for. It lets you customize the Finder’s right-click contextual menu to put essential functions just a click away. It’s also from the Mac App Store, and uses the official Finder Extension framework, so you don’t need to worry about running some weird hack on your machine.
Unfortunately, it only runs on macOS 10.14.4 or later, so I can’t use it on my old iMac. (That’s a sad-face emoji right there.)
Service Station
Photo: Knurling Group
Service Station adds a new section to your Finder’s contextual menu. This is the menu that appears whenever you right-click on a file or folder in the Finder. I use this menu all the time, perhaps to choose which app a file will open in, or to share a file, or to run a service or an Automator action on the Finder selection.
It works fine as is, but it could be a lot better. For instance, the Open In… menu often takes a while to open. And the Services submenu, where I keep all my custom services and Automator actions, has two problems: One, it’s a submenu, so it requires an extra click. Second, all my services appear there, even when they’re not relevant. I don’t need a service that resizes a photo when I click on a text file, for example.
Photo: Knurling Group
Service Station fixes this. It does three things:
- Puts services, AppleScripts and shell scripts in the menu, and only shows the ones that are relevant right now.
- Lets you right-click a folder to open it in the Terminal.
- Adds a customizable Open In… list.
Photo: Knurling Group
It’s the customization that I like most. Nothing makes a menu hard to use like putting in a million options. So, you can pick a few apps to appear when you click on a text file, for example, and they appear at the top level of the menu. Then you just click, scroll and release to launch in any of your prechosen apps.
As I said, I can’t run Service Station on my Mac, because the app requires Mojave or later. I’m sad about that, but at least I can spread the word to Mac power users who can use it. Plus, it’s free to try, and just $15 to unlock pro features.
Price: Free with in-app pro purchase
Download: Service Station from the App Store (macOS)
