[TxMt] TextMate takes over X11 app file associations

[William Scott]

Dear Allan:

On Oct 27, 2006, at 6:45 PM, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> On 28. Oct 2006, at 03:32, William Scott wrote:
>
>> It may be a system shortcoming but it breaks the default OS X  
>> behavior.
>> Personally I always launch X11 apps from the command line like any  
>> other
>> unix program, but OS X has been specifically designed to make these
>> binaries double-clickable or openable with the "open" command (as  
>> well as
>> the defective open-x11 command).
>
> Which application would handle the double click of such unix binary?

The Finder.  If you don't have textmate, you can navigate in the  
Finder to /usr/X11R6/bin and double-click on a file, and it runs.  I  
don't use the system that way -- I'm basically a unix geek, but it is  
the default system behavior.

>
> Can you open it with: open -a «the application which the system  
> seems to have a hardcoded fallback for» «application»? If that is  
> doable, you could do a wrapper for open, which added the -a  
> argument for these binaries.

Apple has a program that does this it calls open-x11.  I guess it is  
useful if one doesn't have /usr/X11/bin in the $PATH, but apart from  
that, it seems kind of silly (and has some odd limitations).

>
>> Is there not a way to simply exclude binary executable files from  
>> those
>> textmate claims as its own?
>
> There is not, as said, this is a system shortcoming.

I wrote a simple-minded shell-script wrapper for "mate" that tests  
files and excludes them if they are binary data files, mainly to  
allow creating projects on the command-line that exclude files I  
can't edit (and pass them off to other programs).  FWIW:  http:// 
xanana.ucsc.edu/Library/init/zsh/local-functions/darwin/edit



>
>> Other editors don't seem to do this.
>
> And other editors does not open README, INSTALL, Makefile, etc.  
> when double-clicked. I got requests for that on a weekly basis  
> before I added the plist entry.

Sorry, I thought it would be easy to exclude specific directories  
like /usr/X11R6/bin and /sw/bin.


I'm not complaining, just curious (and largely ignorant of how these  
things work).

All the best,

Bill