Nov 07, '07 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: robg
I hadn't yet upgraded to the 10.5 version of Smultron (which is what I use to post the hints here each day), primarily because my main machine hasn't yet migrated to 10.5 (that's actually on the schedule for today; I've been too busy writing about 10.5 to actually update my workhorse!). This morning, though, Macworld contributor Kirk McElhearn pointed out a new "feature" that really wasn't all that useful: URLs are automatically converted to hyperlinks, at least visually (they gain an underline and are clickable).
The good news is that the links are only usable within Smultron; when I opened a saved test file in TextEdit, it was pure text. However, Kirk and I both find the visual links distracting in a pure text editor, but there doesn't seem to be a pref to disable them within Smultron. After some digging with strings, though, I found a solution: to disable automatic hyperlinks in Smultron 3.2, enter this in Terminal (after quitting Smultron):
defaults write org.smultron.Smultron AutomaticLinkDetection -bool FALSE
Relaunch Smultron, and you'll find you can again type a URL without having it converted into a link. I expect a future update will add a preference for this setting to the GUI, but until then, this works.
