[TxMt] Re: how can I make TextMate the default editor for text files on 10.5.6

[Allan Odgaard]

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.