On 5 Apr 2009, at 16:13, John Laudun wrote:
In Bill's defense, I have long had this problem with the Finder. If I create a file in Textmate but assign it no extension, a blank document icon is assigned the file and the default application -- no matter how hard you try to change it through the Finder -- to open the file is always TextEdit.
Unless the file is +x, in that case it uses Terminal. But yes, this stuff is hardcoded in Finder and the only way around it is by using <x-man-page://SetFile
to set the creator to TxMt.
I’d encourage people to submit requests for improvements with http://bugreport.apple.com — Apple did introduce the Universal Type Identifiers which allow (to some degree) a bit more fine grained control over this, but Finder does not seem to consult the UTI bindings for files w/o extension.
As many people have pointed out, this is indeed a Finder problem, but it makes it no less frustrating for users who do not wish to have extensions on text files. (In the old days, wasn't that what the resource fork was for? And wasn't the promise of the modern OSes to dispense with the file extension system?)
I’d argue that “name” is meta data for the “content” with the agreed upon convention that it uses a format like “«title»[.«type»]” — a resource fork is just another piece of content meta data which is very fragile since it won’t survive a lot of the mechanisms used to transfer content (unlike the name), so there is little reason trying to split up the name into “title” and “type” and then store the “type” in a new meta data field.