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Summary of Responses (and Thanks)
Authored by: el bid on Apr 02, '02 04:51:36AM

OK, as the author of a dumb "tip" that has raised more questions than it answered, and inspired a very simple answer that shows I'd overlooked the bleedin' obvious, it falls to me, I think, to make amends by summing up the responses here.

The simple answer from nicksay (also spotted by leenoble_uk) is that although you can't open a .textClipping file in TextEdit, you can always drag the file into an already opened TextEdit file. This is obviously The Way To Do It (tm) and is a complete response to the plea in my tip for "something more beautiful". Nice one, nicksay.

Nevertheless, you have to ask (as some of you have) why this strangely unorthogonal behaviour (a file TextEdit can't see to open but can see as a drag item)? Clearly .textClipping dragation is a deep feature of the Cocoa text framework, but resource fork visibility isn't present in the NeXTStep-inherited FileOpen behaviour. My guess is that Apple wants to shift away from this kind or (or indeed any) use of resource forks in future.

leenoble_uk asks: "just occurred to me, haven't tried it out but when you have the clipping open in the Finder what services are available?" The answer of course is "none" -- notoriously Finder is a Carbon app that offers no services at all (as jmil has noticed), just at the point where they would be most useful. This, IMHO, is the one to bug Apple about.

In Apple's defence, seedy offers: "Try this: Get Info on that file and select preview from the drop-down in the GI box. Not bad for a half-baked format." Well, of course the same Preview shows up directly in Finder when you highlight the filename in Columns view. But the "half-baked" thing about this is that although you can read the text like this, you can't, for example, highlight a selection of it and copy that off to somewhere else.

I'm a little puzzled by mike666's "solution": "..to get info on a clipping, go to the Open with Application section, choose TextEdit or your favorite text app, then hit the Change All button? Works like a dream."

Alas, .textClippings files don't offer an "Open with Application" section in the Finder's "Show Info". So, yes, it does work exactly like most of my dreams -- ie, not at all. :-)

Perhaps mike666 has some magic shareware extension installed that allows this. Can we have more news on this?

Thanks very much to everybody who responded to this, er, "tip", especially of course to nicksay and leenoble_uk. In the light of their masterly trumping of the trick I suppose I could just pretend mine was an April Fool's prank. But it wasn't, and I've learnt a lot.

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el bid



[ Reply to This | # ]
textclippings still crummy
Authored by: osxpounder on Oct 07, '04 06:28:04PM

After all this time, dragged text is still hobbled. What a shame. ".textclipping" files are crummy compared to .txt files; the OS should be revised so that dragged and dropped text in Finder becomes a .txt file.

Another drawback to the Preview [Get Info] option is that you can't scroll the text. I just grabbed a few hundred words and dragged them off the browser onto the Desktop. Preview only shows the first 10 lines.

And, yes, mike666 was totally wrong and obviously didn't actually try opening the file in TextEdit. Maybe mike dreamed it.

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osxpounder



[ Reply to This | # ]
textclippings still crummy
Authored by: jiclark on Oct 07, '04 07:27:01PM
After all this time, dragged text is still hobbled.
Hobbled? How so? I believe clipping files (in Panther) are finally back to where they were in the last version of OS 9.x...

I have no issue with the idea that you should be able to have the option of dragging blocks of text to create .txt files, but as clipping files, I'm perfectly happy with the way they work now. The fact that you can open one, hit cmd-c, close it and go paste somewhere else; or alternatively, drop the clipping directly into a document... I personally love that behavior, and use it almost daily.

[ Reply to This | # ]