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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

#81

Post by Qwertious »

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.

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

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

#83

Post by jolux »

smoldesu wrote: post #12
VectorLock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it can be worse than Windows. Not immune, but definitely not worse.

Windows has a good handful of security vulnerabilities, but you'd be surprised by how few people actually "target" Windows devices. Windows still has accountability to their enterprise users, which means they spend most of their time mitigating the more serious stuff rather than some infected exe you'll find floating around the internet. MacOS and it's Unix heritage make it a pretty interesting case study for hackers…

>you'd be surprised by how few people actually "target" Windows devices

What do you mean by this? As a percentage of malware it's not even close, Windows is far and away the most targeted platform: https://www.pcmag.com/news/windows-computers-account-for-83-...

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

#84

Post by smoldesu »

Qwertious wrote: post #81
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.

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

I don't know anyone who says that an IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles. Visual Studio Code is a text editor with more bells and/or whistles than a choo-choo train, but that doesn't make it any more of an IDE than nano and termux.

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

#85

Post by eloff »

smoldesu wrote: post #84
Qwertious wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

I don't know anyone who says that an IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles. Visual Studio Code is a text editor with more bells and/or whistles than a choo-choo train, but that doesn't make it any more of an IDE than nano and termux.

VS code is an IDE by any reasonable measure. Nano is not.

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

#86

Post by smoldesu »

Qwertious wrote: post #70
greggman3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

Concern for legacy is the only thing keeping the field of computing sane these days. If every operating system worked with radically different standards for basic things like filesystems, a significant amount of bespoke work would need to go into each build of every piece of software, and we could very quickly encounter a monopoly scenario where only the rich could afford to develop apps for everyone. All of this is not to say that there aren't already systems doing this: Haiku and Plan-9 are about as esoteric and non-conformant as they get, and their reward for that is a minuscule but dedicated userbase. If Apple wants to make the computer a better experience for the end user, then they're going to have to play ball.

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

#87

Post by Railsify »

Qwertious wrote: post #81
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.

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

But not with file extensions of .txt. They should only do bells and whistles if the extension warrants some bells. .md, sure syntax highlight me. But opening .txt and treating it as html, that seems strange.

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

#88

Post by irq »

Railsify wrote: post #87
Qwertious wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want text editors to do non text-editing stuff, then people need to stop saying we should build development environments around text editors. "An IDE is just a text editor with bells and whistles", people say. Well if that's the case, it's not surprising if people "only ship the one text editor".

But not with file extensions of .txt. They should only do bells and whistles if the extension warrants some bells. .md, sure syntax highlight me. But opening .txt and treating it as html, that seems strange.

> But opening.txt and treating it as html, that seems strange.

I’d go as far as to call it negligent, not merely strange.

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

#89

Post by throwawayboise »

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.

TextEdit dates back to NeXTStep, so it was originally written in the late 1980s probably. Guessing it didn't render HTML originally, but it always had RTF capability. Not that it's an excuse in 2021, but very few applications from that era woudl be considered "safe" today.

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

#90

Post by smoldesu »

jolux wrote: post #83
smoldesu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has a good handful of security vulnerabilities, but you'd be surprised by how few people actually "target" Windows devices. Windows still has accountability to their enterprise users, which means they spend most of their time mitigating the more serious stuff rather than some infected exe you'll find floating around the internet. MacOS and it's Unix heritage make it a pretty interesting case study for hackers…

>you'd be surprised by how few people actually "target" Windows devices What do you mean by this? As a percentage of malware it's not even close, Windows is far and away the most targeted platform: https://www.pcmag.com/news/windows-computers-account-for-83-...

It's also far and away the most used platform, so it should surprise nobody that it's the most targeted.
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