Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

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.

Text ≠ Plain Text. TextEdit defaults to rtf. It supports html as an alternative to rtf, which is to say it can do basic formatting and nothing else.

It's perfectly reasonable to expect a text editor to support more than literal unicode, and to work with a variety of commonly-used formats.

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

#102

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

lupire wrote: post #93

Why is TextEdit accessing the Internet without permission? Does Big Sur's Access Control block stuff like this?

From the OP it sounds like there is a very weird feature/component in MacOS called "AutoMount" and/or "AutoFS" that lets HTTP GET network requests be made via reading file system locations... and it may somehow escape other access controls?

I too am curious for more details about this. Where did this feature come from, how has it been used, has it actually been used?

Is AutoMount/AutoFS still there after this CVE patch? Does it indeed circumvent Access Control or other such things? Is it a likely path for other security problems?

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

#103

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #92

dylan604 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What does that do?

just like a box of crayons. when they are new, all of the lables are crisp and clean, and the edges of the crayons are square/flat. after using the crayons, the tips become rounded, and you have to peel the labels back as the crayon wears down.

so does the crayon color picker. at least it did in older versions of the OS. haven't looked at it in a reallly long time, as it was def a gimmick more than function

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

#104

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

chc wrote: post #65

monadic11 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"plaintext gui editor" sounds like you are editing GUIs... in plaintext? Maybe a plaintext markup language for GUI's... I guess that's what HTML is!

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

#105

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

Oh, man. The idea that TextEdit automatically parsed .txt files as HTML if they started with a certain file signature is problematic...

...but the fact that file:// schemes can access remote files by appending /net/ followed by a domain name is pretty shocking.

I mean, the entire purpose of "file://" would seem to be to provide access to local/mounted files and only those.

The fact that a Mac engineer thought it would be a great "feature" to allow file:// to access the entire internet is... kinda terrifying. Did that get patched, or was it only TextEdit?

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

#106

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

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.

I too have been annoyed to not have a simple bundled paint program (I remmeber MacPaint!), but bundled application software is not really what determines whether an OS is a decent desktop OS.

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

#107

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

minusf wrote: post #78

perryizgr8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

preview's basic annotation functions cover most of what paint can do, or am i missing something?

It can sort of hackily fill some extremely extremely basic functions (I know cause I do it too), but even that is pretty hacky, like how do you create a new blank document 800px by 600px to start painting on?

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

#108

Post by jjtheblunt » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #105

Oh, man. The idea that TextEdit automatically parsed .txt files as HTML if they started with a certain file signature is problematic... ...but the fact that file:// schemes can access remote files by appending /net/ followed by a domain name is pretty shocking. I mean, the entire purpose of "file://" would seem to be to provide access to local/mounted files and only those. The fact that a Mac engineer thought it woul…

I think it carries over from NeXTstep, iirc.

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

#109

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

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.

It's a rich text editor by default. Rich text is still text.

Opening HTML files and converting them to rich text certainly does belong as a valid feature for a rich text editor. It'll open and convert Word files too, which is super useful.

The content-type autodetection, however, I agree was a bad idea. Still, this vulnerability presumably existed with an .html file opened in TextEdit.

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

#110

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

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.

I think this captures my sentiment on the matter as well. Applications today want to be a swiss army knife and do just about every job.. and do it poorly. I do expect that level of complexity from RStudio, but probably not from Notepad. I would probably kinda accept it in Notepad++.

So real question. Is TextEdit a default text editor in a mac?