duti

I agree with you, it's infuriating. I think it's been loading faster recently (maybe?), but it still takes like 10 seconds. To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti): duti -s com.apple.textedit public.${whatever} all Where ${whatever} is in {plain-text, json, source-code, ...}. I'm sure there's a way to automate this through parsing `lsregister -dump`, but have a script I run on every Mac I have that sets TextEdit as the default instead of XCode for a bunch of file types :-)

Bello! Made this to help navigate the tumultuous process of navigating to a new machine on Mac when you have a number of custom utilities setup for editing particular files. This is designed to make that as easy as possible, and add some magic on top of that, like setting mailto handlers or anything else of that breed. Use XDG_CONFIG_HOME to keep it organized. Credit to https://github.com/moretension/duti for the original inspiration for the project. Happy to answer and help with whatever.

I’ve used the `duti` CLI for a while to set defaults per file type; never had any issues since. https://github.com/moretension/duti (or `brew install duti`)