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Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

paulosyibelo.com

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Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#61

Post by dang »

marcinzm wrote: post #4

To the author: This website seems to use something called SmoothScroll (edit: a javascript library) which makes my scrolling really really jumpy/janky. I'm using chrome on a MacBook with the touchpad. Made it basically impossible to scroll around the page which in turn made it very difficult for me to read the article.

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Note: I'm not saying such things aren't annoying—it's the opposite—which is why we need a site guideline to prevent discussions from being dominated by them.)

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#62

Post by dylan604 »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #55
dsjfalksjdflksa wrote: post #11

To this day osx still doesn't ship with a true plaintext gui editor.

It also doesn't ship with a paint program. OSx has a lot of ground to cover before it can function as a decent desktop OS.

oh come on, how much more do you need than a crayon based color picker? ever set the date of your system to waaay into the future and then look at the crayon color picker? after providing that, what else could you possibly need?

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#63

Post by sircastor »

throwanem wrote: post #34
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #17

File extensions are a kludge anyway. (And Windows 10 still hides them by default, because hey, backwards compatibility, and you wouldn't want to confuse Grandma who's seen the file be called "grandkids" since Windows 95..). Why should the filetype be dependent on the name? People even think renaming a .BMP to .JPG means now it's a compressed file! Old school Macs stored the filetype outside of a file, so you can rena…

Not really outside. The metadata was stored in a so-called "resource fork", with the file contents proper in a "data fork", both of which belonged to the file per se. Part of the resource fork was the "creator code", four bytes identifying the application which had created or could open the file, and the "type code", four more bytes defining which, among the potentially many kinds of files a given application could o…

I was in my tweens/early teens when I learned about ResEdit. I thought it was some kind of hacker tool, and I was amused at the various things I could change.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#64

Post by [deleted] »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #17

File extensions are a kludge anyway. (And Windows 10 still hides them by default, because hey, backwards compatibility, and you wouldn't want to confuse Grandma who's seen the file be called "grandkids" since Windows 95..). Why should the filetype be dependent on the name? People even think renaming a .BMP to .JPG means now it's a compressed file! Old school Macs stored the filetype outside of a file, so you can rena…

[deleted]

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#65

Post by chc »

monadic11 wrote: post #44
dsjfalksjdflksa wrote: post #11

To this day osx still doesn't ship with a true plaintext gui editor.

Probably a quirk of english that I don't see as a native speaker, but I'd phrase this as a gui plaintext editor. Also, people not served by textedit are pretty niche.

I think both sound equally valid. One sort of expands to "a GUI editor for plain text" in my mind and the other is more like "a plain text editor with a GUI."

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#66

Post by dylan604 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #8
alpha_squared wrote: post #7

How does something like this wind up on the front page? As of this comment, it was posted 48 minutes ago with 12 points , one other comment, and sits at number 5. It's a self-professed clickbait title, though the content is interesting.

The ranking algorithm put it here.

the Zuck strikes again

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#67

Post by movedx »

userbinator wrote: post #56

Two words: excessive complexity. It's always seemed strange that an application called TextEdit is actually more than a text editor. I strongly believe that content-type autodetection, much less HTML rendering(!), most certainly does not belong in a text editor.

Agreed. This problem exists because someone wrote a tool that should only do one (really well) and but instead made it do five different things.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#70

Post by Qwertious »

greggman3 wrote: post #45
throwanem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really outside. The metadata was stored in a so-called "resource fork", with the file contents proper in a "data fork", both of which belonged to the file per se. Part of the resource fork was the "creator code", four bytes identifying the application which had created or could open the file, and the "type code", four more bytes defining which, among the potentially many kinds of files a given application could o…

Yes, and it sounded great on paper but was horrible for interoperability because a file was not self contained from the POV of filesystems that didn't support the resource fork. Every file you wanted to distribute cross platform needed 2 versions. One with all that metadata bundled up for Mac, one without it for everything else. It was a nightmare OS-X dropped it for good reason.

>but was horrible for interoperability

This makes me sad - it was dropped because of problems with other operating systems, not because it was necessarily a bad architecture.

I understand why they would do it, but it makes you wonder how much better our systems could be if it weren't for concerns about legacy.

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