Start Choosy at login

Enable this option to have Choosy start whenever you login to your Mac. If you disable this option, Choosy will start up the first time you click on a link. This option is probably most useful when paired with the Display Choosy icon in the menu bar option (see below).

Display Choosy icon in the menu bar

Allows you to display a Choosy icon at the top right of your screen in the menu bar. This gives you access to a menu which allows you to quickly launch browsers and access Choosy's settings. Note that the menu bar icon will only be displayed while Choosy is running, so you will probably want to use this setting in conjunction with the start Choosy at login option.

Expanding short URLs in the prompt

When Choosy is displaying a URL in the prompt, it can optionally try to expand a short URL (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) to the full URL it points to.

Short URLs are expanded by making a request to the short URL, and seeing where it redirects to. This has two important implications:

1. Choosy will have to make network requests to expand short URLs. If you enable this feature, and you run firewall software on your Mac you may be prompted to allow Choosy to make network requests.
2. Resolving a short URL can be quite slow, depending on a huge number of factors (how fast your Internet connection is, how quickly the URL shortening service responds, etc.). Because this can be time consuming Choosy only expands short URLs when displaying them in the prompt, it will not try to expand short URLs before applying your rules. For example, if you have a rule to open links containing apple.com in Safari, a bit.ly link that resolves to apple.com will not trigger that rule.

There are three options for expanding short URLs:

Never expand URLs

Choosy will never try to expand URLs for you.

Only expand known short URLs (bit.ly, tinyurl etc.)

Choosy will only try to expand URLs for you if they are from a known URL shortening service. See below for more information about which services are supported.

Try to expand all URLs

Choosy will make a request to all URLs that it opens to see if they respond by redirecting to another web site.

Supported URL shortening services

• 4sq.com
• amzn.to
• bit.ly
• cl.ly
• flic.kr
• gbrck.com
• gdzl.la
• goo.gl
• gowal.la
• gu.com
• is.gd
• j.mp
• ow.ly
• post.ly
• t.co
• tinyurl.com
• tr.im
• youtu.be

Adding more URL shortening services

You can add more URL shortening services to Choosy by creating a property list file that lists their domains.

1. Copy and paste the following code into a new TextEdit file:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
   <plist version="1.0">
   <array>
     <string>example.org</string>
   </array>
   </plist>

2. Replace example.org with the URL shortener that you want to use
3. Add any other shorteners on subsequent lines, e.g.:

     <string>example.org</string>
     <string>example.com</string>

4. Save the file to /Users/you/Library/Application Support/Choosy/short_urls.plist (replacing you with your own username)