[yugyug]

I have two hard disks in my macbook, a main one with os x lion and a secondary disk with snow leopard. This is a setup I'd liked to keep for now. But when I'm mainly using the Lion disk, how can I prevent the os from opening up files in the snow leopard duplicate applications and also hide these from the right click contextual "open with.." menus?

I thought about zipping up the whole snow leopard apps folder but thats kind of a hassle to undo if I want to boot in to snow leopard and use it in a hurry.

?

[jmiddel]

Why would the OS open files using apps on another partition, with an older version of the OS? I probably don't understand your problem, Would you mind clarifying?

[reader50]

In the Open With context menus, OSX tends to show all versions of an app that can open a file. Especially from different mounted volumes. Sometimes (but not always) OSX will add the major version numbers beside the dup apps.

It would be useful to flag the copy from the boot volume, or hide earlier copies.

[turtle777]

What if you just unmount the unused OS X volume ?

Yes, you'd have to do it every time you restart, but it should fix it.

-t

[dimmer]

Rather than zipping the apps you don't want to see, you could move them to a disk image file. Much less hassle. I'm in the same situation as you are, but since "Open with…" shows version numbers I don't find it enough of a PITA to bother with.

There may be a way of telling the OS not to show certain apps in the menu, but again it may be more of a pain to work with.

jmiddel: users with more than one copy of an App, in either a different location or partition, can still run those apps. So if (for example) I have two copies of GraphicConvertor (v2.x and 3.x) and I right click on a suitable document, the "Open with…" menu will show both and allow me to select which to use.

[jmiddel]

Dimmer, thank you for the clarification. I suppose I was thinking this a non-issue, since when you open a file it will open up with last used version of the app, unless you purposely right click and chose a different version.

[Big Mac]

The last used version of the app has nothing to do with it. Case in point: On my mother's MBP I always use LibreOffice to edit ODT documents. But if I make the mistake of just double clicking them they open in an old version of NeoOffice from some dark corner of the drive. I've even repeatedly chosen LibreOffice in the Open With Other Application dialog box and have clicked to make this change for all files of the ODT type, but it never sticks: NeoOffice is still the default.

LaunchServices can be weird. I wish Apple would provide a utility to tweak it.

[P]

You can also open something by dragging it onto an icon on the desktop or the Dock. If it is only a small number of apps you open in, put them permanently in the Dock and start dragging files to those icons.

[yugyug]

thanks for all the responses. Sorry to hear there isn't an easy way to clean up the contextual menus, but no worries I'll survive. To the last poster, I sometimes open file types in many different applications, I don't really have the space on my dock, but more to the point, I hate dragging files IMO its slow and inefficient. I'm a keyboard junkie and I hate it that with each iteration mac os seems to have less and less keyboard functionality. Except cut-paste in Lion (finally!).