111–120 of 316 posts
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.
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…
Filenames exist to provide context for the data inside. "Draft 2020 Quarterly Report.txt" and "Draft 2020 Quarterly Report.csv" could contain the exact same data, but the file extension indicates how the file is intended to be used, just as "2020" indicates the relevant year and "Draft" indicates completeness.
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 seems like the only real issue here is that a file:// URL can make a network request. Who could ever think that that would be a good idea?
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…
On the contrary, it's a simple and explicit (when not stupidly hidden...) way of denoting the file type, which is great for interoperability and information interchange. Proprietary, opaque mechanisms like resource forks only serve to keep users uninformed (and thus unlearning) and impede the free interchange of information between different applications.
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.
(Though in fairness, text editors do usually have special casing for file extensions and these days tools like ls will colour filenames based on the extension.)