By Dan Moren

May 25, 2016 7:41 AM PT

Quick Tip: Restore missing Share menu options

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

So, there I was, about to email my girlfriend a webpage–The Wirecutter’s new travel gear guide, if you must know–and for some reason, rather than copying and pasting the URL as is my wont, I instead found myself thinking “Wait, isn’t there a way to do this right from Safari?”

I was pretty sure there was even a keyboard shortcut, but searching the Help menu for “mail”–another of my handy tricks–didn’t show any results in the menus. So I went to the Share button in the toolbar and noticed, bizarrely, that there wasn’t an email option there either.

Huh.

A quick Google search turned this up as a known problem with, thankfully, a known solution from Apple. Just fire up Terminal and enter this line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed

Wait for the Terminal prompt to show up, and blammo: all your Share extensions should be showing up again. (If they don’t, you’ll want to check the Extensions pane in System Preferences and make sure they’re enabled.)

It seems like this issue cropped up when upgrading from Yosemite to El Capitan…which shows you just how often I use the Share menu, I guess.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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