Text files and BBEdit

DEVONthink Tips
1

This is probably a simple question but …

My favourite writing tool is BBEdit, so I of course want all my text files to open in BBEdit … at least most of them. But if I drag a BBEdit document to DT and click on the "Open in external …" button the document opens in TextEdit, if I click the "Launch URL" button the orginal document is opened by BBEdit.

But I want to save all my text documents "in" DT and only have them there … but I still want to have it opened in BBEdit (with saved state info etc), how can I do this?

2

Please try to verify that the default application for those files is BBEdit as DEVONthink just tells the system to start the appropriate default application.

3

So DEVONthink doesn’t look at creator code/type?

4

Even if it would, it’s the job of OS X to launch the appropriate application for a file (as a BBEdit creator does not mean that BBEDit has to be the default application for such files).

5

How does the Finder handle this? There I don’t need to defined BBEdit to handle all text files, it seems to use the creator/type before it tries to do something else.

6

"Open Externally" is similar to exporting a content and double-clicking on the file in the Finder. Therefore you could try this:

  1. Export some of your contents
  2. Double click on them in the Finder
  3. Which application is launched?
  4. What’s the file extension of your contents?
7

I think the key question is “What’s the file extension of your contents?”

Unless I’m writing something in LaTeX I don’t usually use extensions … I’m one of those who think that choosing what application to launch shouldn’t be based on extension (Apple made a huge mistake here) but on the content of the documents.

OK, now I know how to work around the problem.

(and I really, really like the 1.7 release … I’m currently trying to get you another customer  ;D )

8

Thanks :slight_smile: But in the end (and of course due to file exchange problems), Apple does not like type and creator codes anymore. And it’s unlikely they’ll ever switch back - file extensions are the way to go.

9

I agree on that Apple is never going to go back … unfortunately. My only hope is that Windows users are going to get so sick and tired of not being able to have different program for reading text files, jpegs etc so that Microsoft changes their behaviour … then we perhaps can get the old behaviour back on OS X  ;D

(but I’m not going to hold my breath until it happens :smiley:)