Affinity Designer lost file associations and I can't reestablish it

[vitaprimo]

For some days Designer files (.afdesign) have been trying [and failing] to load in Affinity Photo; since I can go around it just dropping them into Designer's Dock icon, I really didn't care that much, today I also got this:

I mumbled something to myself and try to reset associations but instead they don't set, when I click to change for all files I get a QuickLook thing instead:

I'm selecting Affinity Designer, of course, not QuickLook, I don't even know where that is.

I think it must be a macOS thing since I don't remember having updated Designer recently, in fact I checked updates explicitly for Designer and they weren't any and macOS on the other hand is getting pretty sneaky with automatic crap.  I'm going back to High Sierra but I haven't finished setting up a syncing solution to replace iClouds.  What could I do to fix associations while I get ready to downgrade?

 

[v_kyr]

You can try to right click in the Finder on a .afdesign file and then select "Open with ..." and choose Designer, this often fixes this for me.

• How to manage file associations in macOS
• ... do a Google search after this topic, there are a bunch of articles about that theme ...

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, vitaprimo said:

I'm selecting Affinity Designer, of course, not QuickLook, I don't even know where that is.

FWIW, QuickLook.qlgenerator isn't even really an app. It is a "qlgenerator" (Quick Look generator) used by the quicklookd.app (Quick Look daemon) to show previews of Affinity files when you press the spacebar in Finder. It is part of Designer, at path /Applications/Affinity Designer.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook, but aside from generating the Quick Look preview for the daemon, it can't open the file.

Maybe rebuilding the launch services database like in the article @v_kyr mentioned will fix this. If not, reinstalling Designer might.

[vitaprimo]

Thanks I already knew that, but still associations wouldn't work.

Then, by force of habit I guess, I click the button where it should read Designer and it launched it anyway! I lost Internet for the last few days bc of a firewall change so I couldn't update the post to be a non-issue anymore. I'm still going down an OS version though, if it wasn't for Designer I'd move wipe it completely and use RHEL instead, or Fedora. IDK. There's Designer for Windows so I'm hopeful.

BTW, associations are working again, it still shows the QuickLook agent but I can double click or cmd+↓ again in Finder to summon it. Thanks again!

 

[vitaprimo]

On 2/12/2019 at 6:41 PM, v_kyr said:

You can try to right click in the Finder on a .afdesign file and then select "Open with ..." and choose Designer, this often fixes this for me.

• How to manage file associations in macOS
• ... do a Google search after this topic, there are a bunch of articles about that theme ...

Thanks, that's what I did, except a little further; your way only sets associations for that specific file, if you cmd+i, or get the file's info, there's a section where there's the open with thing again, but it says something about for all. That changes it systemwide. When I did though, I kept choosing Designer but it would select the QuickLook agent for Designer instead at the moment of saving. The good thing is that it fixed itself--well, mostly. Thanks!