OpenMenu X: Take Control of the Right-Click

As promised here's the first mini-review of a favorite utility: OpenMenu X:

I've been looking for OpenMenuX practically as long as I've been using OS X. I love contextual menus; right-clicking (or control-clicking for purists) to access an appropriate menu just seems so right to me. Since switching to an Intel Mac, however, many of my favorite contextual menu item programs no longer work (above all QuickImage CM, not updated since 2004). But even beyond these (mostly Finder) plugins, I've always wanted to be able to customize my contextual menus in all programs with the things that I want.

With OpenMenuX this is now possible. It installs as a Preference Pane, and once installed it allows you to define a custom contextual menu that will appear any time you right click in practically any application.

Within the preference pane you can define various folders you wish to appear in the contextual menu, each of which can include a variety of items such as: folder locations, URLs, Services (from the Services Menu), Applications (becoming a launcher), and, best of all, Applescripts.

Included with OpenMenuX are 50 different Applescripts that do a variety of convenient things (such as searching websites,, translating words, etc.). Best of all, many of these Applescripts work on selected text. So, for instance, you can select a word, right-click, invoke the "Lookup Wikipedia" script within OpenMenu X, and the Wikipedia page with the appropriate entry will open in your default browser. So suppose you're reading TUAW and you run across something you don't recognize. A quick right-click takes you to the Wikipedia page on DHCP

You can also exclude any program within which you don't want the contextual menu to appear. The only downside of OpenMenu X I can see is that it only allows you to generate a global contextual menu, rather than a program specific one. With nested folders, however, I can accommodate pretty much everything I need.

OpenMenu X is $10 Shareware.