Drag any file onto a radial menu to open it in any app

"Open With" on macOS is one of those small papercuts that adds up. You right-click the file. You hover over Open With. You wait — because the submenu genuinely takes a moment to populate while macOS figures out which apps can handle the file. You scan the list. You click the one you wanted. You do this eight times a day.

The alternatives are worse. You could change the default handler for that file type, but that changes it for every future file too, which isn't what you want. You could drag the file onto the Dock icon of the target app, but half your apps aren't in the Dock. You could use Services, but nobody knows how to configure Services.

The gesture that actually matches what you're trying to do is simpler: drag the file, flick toward the app, release. The file opens in that app. No menus. No defaults changed. No clicking through three levels.

Why "Open With" is structurally slow

The reason the macOS Open With submenu takes a beat is that Launch Services has to query every registered app that claims to handle the file's UTI, rank them, and build the list on demand. This is fine engineering. It's also latency you feel every single time, especially on a Mac that's been running for weeks and has hundreds of installed apps.

A radial menu skips that entirely. The apps on your wedges are apps you chose. There's no discovery, no ranking, no list to populate. You already picked the four or five apps you might ever want to open this file type in, so the menu just presents them and waits for your flick.

This is the difference between "let the OS figure out what's possible" and "let me point at what I want." Both have their place, but for repeated daily work, pointing is faster.

How drag-to-wedge works in practice

The gesture is:

1. Start dragging a file — from Finder, from a browser, from Mail, from Messages, from anywhere that supports file drags.
2. While still holding the drag, summon Swik with your trigger (hotkey or mouse button).
3. Move the cursor toward the wedge for the app you want to open the file in.
4. Release the drag over that wedge. The file opens in that app.

That's the whole interaction. Because you're dragging, the file's path is already on the macOS pasteboard, and Swik just hands it to the target app via the standard NSWorkspace open call. It's the same mechanism the Dock uses when you drag a file onto a Dock icon — just with a radial picker instead of a fixed strip of icons.

Where it actually matters

The first time you use drag-to-wedge, it feels like a small thing. After a week, you notice how many micro-decisions it removed. A few concrete examples:

PNG files. You have a PNG in Downloads. Sometimes you want to drop it into Figma as an import. Sometimes you want to crop it in Preview. Sometimes you want to open it in Photoshop or Affinity for real editing. Setting a default is wrong — it's context-dependent every time. Drag-to-wedge lets you put Figma, Preview, and Photoshop on three wedges and pick per file.

HTML files. Double-clicking an HTML file opens it in your default browser, which is almost never what you want when the file is a local dev artifact. What you actually want is: VS Code if you're editing it, Chrome if you're checking how it renders, sometimes both. Drag to Swik, flick to "VS Code" or flick to "Chrome," release. The default handler stays untouched.

PDFs. Preview is fine for quick viewing. Skim is better for annotating papers. A browser is better for filling out forms. Marker apps like PDF Expert are better for signatures. One PDF type, four sensible destinations, none of which should be the global default.

Video files. QuickTime for playback. IINA for anything QuickTime can't handle. Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve for editing. HandBrake for conversion. A MP4 could be any of those depending on what you're doing with it.

A file-handling profile

Here's what a "drag files at this menu" profile looks like for someone who works with a lot of mixed media:

Eight wedges of "places I might want this file to go," plus a sub-menu of less-frequent targets. Every drag ends in a flick. You stop thinking about which app should get which file — you just point.

A few things to know

Apps have to accept the file type. This isn't magic — Swik opens the file the same way Finder does. If you drag a Blender project onto a Figma wedge, Figma will either refuse the file or do something unhelpful. Pick apps that can handle the file types you care about.

You can drag multiple files at once. macOS bundles multi-file drags into a single payload. Flick toward a wedge while dragging ten PDFs, and all ten open in the target app (assuming the app supports multi-file open, which most do).

Some apps want "hold while dragging" to activate Swik. The cleanest way to trigger the menu mid-drag is to assign a modifier key — for example, holding Ctrl while dragging summons the menu without interrupting the drag. This is configurable in Swik's trigger settings. Find the combination that doesn't fight with drag-and-drop gestures in your most-used apps.

Drag-to-slot is a Pro feature. It's one of the things that's genuinely new — most launchers are text-in, action-out. A drag-aware launcher needs extra plumbing to accept file payloads cleanly, and it's gated behind the one-time Pro purchase along with mouse button triggers and unlimited wedges.

It doesn't replace Finder's Open With — it sits next to it. For file types you rarely touch, the right-click menu is still fine. For the five file types you handle twenty times a day, drag-to-wedge is faster every time.