Connect to Server, XMenu-Style

If you find yourself needing to mount remote volumes fairly often, here’s handy way to do it from XMenu’s User-Defined menu instead of littering your Desktop with aliases.

First things first… in XMenu’s Preferences, you’ll need the User-Defined menu On. Also, you’ll need to mount a remote volume or machine and ideally be showing drive icons on your desktop.

Right-click XMenu’s User-Defined icon in the menubar (it looks like a gear) and choose Open Folder. Now holding your Command and Option keys, drag a mounted drive to this folder to create an alias. Note that there are times when you have drives mounted that may be named the same (like the default “Macintosh HD”). You can rename the alias to something more helpful if you’d like.

Now unmount the drive, click on the User-Defined menu icon and click the alias to the volume. Unless you’ve saved the credentials to your Keychain you will be presented with the authentication dialog like any other connection, and the Finder mounts the volume.

Note: If you turn on Follow Links in XMenu’s Preferences, you should see an arrow next to the name in XMenu after mounting the volume. This does allow you to navigate from that mount point but you may want to disallow this as the remote folder may contain a large number of items and stall.