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?
>
> Thanks for an interesting read!
>
> I think what you propose sounds good but this is more in the domain of
> Vim than MacVim so I guess it is up to Bram to decide whether he'd
> include such a feature in Vim or not.  Until then I'm quite willing to
> merge a patch with the git repo if you decide to write one.