Useful Contextual Menu Plug-i

One of the least-used but quite powerful tools in Mac OS X is the ability to run contextual menu plug-i . Contextual menu items are those little programs or acce ories that can be i talled in /Library/Contextual Menu Items or ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items to extend the capabilities of your operating system by providing a quick way to launch a tool based on some selected text for a selected item in the Finder.

Here are some of my favorite Contextual Menu items/a licatio :

FinderPop gives you the ability to have quickly-acce ible links to a licatio or folders at the top of your contextual menu. So, for i tance, if you want to open a JPEG file with Photoshop i tead of Preview (often the OS's default), you can put a link to Photoshop in your FinderPop contextual menu list and then right-clicking on the file in question will give you a quick list of a licatio at the top-most menu. This is faster than having to wait for the "Open With" a lication list to generate, which is useful if you have a lot of a licatio i talled on your system.

OnMyCommand lets you execute a string of selected text in the Terminal.

SymbolicLinker is a contextual menu item that lets you build symlink to an item in the Finder. I've found this very useful in building lab and cla room images where my workstatio have much of their shared data as symlinks to other locatio in the filesystem. For i tance, Microsoft Office 2004 likes to i tall 80MB of fonts for each user but I don't want doze of user profiles each with 80MB of fonts on my workstatio , so I've used symlinks to "trick" the program into thinking that each profile has the fonts i talled but the actual fonts are located in a shared folder ace. But because the symlink exists (but points to a different location), the software just follows the link. I've used the same trick for the exce ive su ort files i talled by the Macromedia suite.

FileCutter brings a much-desired Windows feature to Mac OS X--cut and paste. I know a lot of Windows guys who are pi ed that Mac OS X doe 't use the same "cut and paste" paradigm they are used to from years of Windows use. One of them actually jumped in the air and clicked his heels together when I showed him FileCutter. (Okay, he didn't click his heels together, but he jumped out of his chair).

There are more CM plug-i out there. Some a licatio i tall their own, like Toast or StickyBrain. Which ones do you use and why? Are there any "must-haves" that I've mi ed?