Re: MacVim file encoding and Quicklook

>
> Hi all,
>
> Here's a little experiment. Take the following text and copy it to the
> clipboard:
>
> <text>
> |♜|♞|♝|♛|♚|♝|♞|♜|
> |♟|♟|♟|♟|♟|♟|♟|♟|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> |♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|♙|
> </text>
>
> Now paste it (1) into TextEdit and save it  and (2) paste it into
> MacVim and save it. (Other text with non-ascii characters will do, too)
>
> For the Leopard users out there, take a look at the resulting files
> with Quicklook.
>
> Results: The file written by TextEdit looks ok in QL, the file written
> by MacVim does not. If you compare the two files, you'll see that they
> both use UTF-8 encoding, so that's not what confuses Quicklook. So,
> what's the cause? /Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit/README.rtf hints
> at some extended file attributes that TextEdit stores in Leopard and
> refers to http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/
> Foundation.html for more information. If you search the latter page
> for "com.apple.TextEncoding", you'll see that `-[NSString
> writeToFile:atomically:encoding:error]` and friends write the encoding
> to an extended attribute. There's also a description of the format of
> the extended attribute ("this is not some undocumented stuff").
>
>  Indeed, if you check the two files with `ls -l`, you'll see that the
> file written by TextEdit has an "@" (that means it has an extended
> attribute). Now, if you do `ls -l@` or `xattr -l filename`, you'll see
> that the TextEdit file has the com.apple.TextEncoding attribute set:
>
>     Macintosh-2:b nico$ xattr -l texteditfile.txt
>     com.apple.TextEncoding: UTF-8;134217984
>
> The file written by MacVim does not have this attribute. If you add it
> (`xattr -w com.apple.TextEncoding 'UTF-8;134217984' macvimfile.txt`),
> the file shows up correctly in Quicklook (and in TextEdit too; it
> didn't do that before).
>
> Obvious suggestion: MacVim should have an option 'encodingxattr` that
> can have the values 'read' and 'write' (default 'read,write'). If
> 'write' is set, the com.apple.TextEncoding xattr is written when
> saving a file. When 'read' is set, the xattr is checked when reading a
> file.
>
> According to http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/7 , the
> xattr api is already present in Tiger, so the option could be
> supported in both Tiger and Leopard (TextEdit and Quicklook only seem
> to honor the xattr on Leopard, though).
>
> Comments?