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