Random BLANK textedit file generated -- '%A1%B1%A1%AF' - macos

I'm a rails developer seeking a fix to an annoying problem.
Recently, I've been noticing some random textedit file being generated in wherever directory I was working.
The file looks like this.
Click this Image
After spending some time, I was able to find out that the file was generated every time I opened up Terminal. Even after I delete that random file, it gets regenerated if I open the Terminal app.
It says that the file is a TextEdit document, with 0 bytes of size.
When I open the file, there's no text.
It is so annoying because it gets tracked by git, and I have to delete it every time I am committing/pushing my work.

Disregarding the causes why you have this bug, you can simply use a gitignore file to stop the file from being staged. You define a pattern and all files fitting will be excluded. It's generally recommended to have a gitignore to make sure no wrong files are staged.
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

Related

Xcode can't find source files

I'm using Xcode 8. I recently inherited a project with several hundred files (including source and image files). I rearranged them on my local drive and the file names (appropriately) become red in the folder list on the left side of Xcode. I selected files/folders in this folder list, click on the "Hide or show Utilities" button to display the "Identity and Type" pane on the right side of Xcode, clicked on the little folder icon next to the Location, and selected the files'/folders' new locations. The text in that pane was updated to the new location and the file/folder names changed from red to black. So far, so good. I did this to all of the file/folder names until none of them were displayed in red.
However, when I go to build the project, I get numerous warning messages similar to, "image.png /Users/Me/Project/images/image.png is missing from working copy." The path shown in the error message is the file's OLD location. When I look at that image in the file list, it is displayed in black. When I select that file and look at the Full Path in the pane on the right, it shows the file's current location (e.g., "/Users/Me/Project/images/newfolder/image.png"). I'm unsure where in the project the old location is being stored. FWIW, I've tried Cleaning the project...
Thanks for insights.
So here is an approach that is perhaps not for the meek, yet it is something I do more often than one would expect to fix Xcode project files. I tend to be the one designated to do this on the teams I work with ... manually editing the project file. The .xcodeproj file is really just a special folder. The actual project file is project.pbxproj.
First back up the project file. Your choice on if you want to do the complete .xcodeproj or just the project.pbxproj.
Use your favorite text editor and open up the project.pbxproj file.
Search and replace the prefix to your path. For the sake of this exercise, you should try and keep your path as similar as possible to make it easier. For example, if the hardcoded path is /Users/Me/Project/Images/newfolder/image.png and all prefixes are generally "/Users/Me/Project", you can just do a search on "/Users/Me/" or "/Users/Me/Project" (the latter if you want more safety) and replace with "/Users/You/" or "/Users/You/Project". Note I am not searching on "Me" and replacing with "You". You want to search and replace but as controlled as possible.
Once done, save and open the project. If the project doesn't open at all, it means you messed something up. Start over. Note that changing the paths should not be sufficient to break the file. It will probably mean you accidentally added or deleted something.
If the project file opens now build. It should hopefully build.
Okay, so that gets you into a buildable state. Now you really want to fix things. Whomever did the project was a knucklehead for using absolute paths.
This next part will be tedious. There are probably ways to do this manually, but I'll leave that to an exercise for the reader right now. In file inspector within Xcode, you will want to change files to be anything but "Absolute Path". Here is an example, you can see the location is "Relative to Group".
Essentially you are going to have to around to Groups and files and fix things up to not be absolute. Make sure you backup incrementally and can build.
Wait, but unfortunately there is more. You'll then need to go into Build Settings to see if things are absolute paths. Then you'll need to decide how to adjust for that. For example, it is not uncommon for 3rd Party frameworks to be added with absolute paths.
Or I suppose if you want to, you can just get it working and skip the latter part of this and damn everyone else...

How can I create a new file in Xcode without adding it to any target?

Sometimes I just want to create a plain text file for storing JSON or whatever.
Normally I would just press cmdN to create a new file in Xcode. But it always adds the created file to the project! That means I need to delete it from the project every time!
I thought that this was because I checked the target that I want to add the file to here:
So I unchecked "TestingArea" and created the file. But it still adds the file to the project!
I know that I can use the TextEdit app, but since I have lots of apps placed on the Dock, finding it takes a long time.
Any solutions?

How do I save and load all files in a sublime text session as a 'project'?

I've read that you can save a ' project ' but apparently I'm doing it wrong.
What I've done is...
Create a js, html and css file and use view/layout with 3 columns so
each file has its own section of the layout.
I then went to Project / save project as / and saved the respective file in
a directory
I assumed that all files should be saved in this directory along with a file that I can click that loads them all up to reflect the workflow.
Apparently sublime has a different idea of how this should work and I do not understand it.
Essentially, there are two parts to a Sublime project - a .sublime-project file, and a .sublime-workspace file. Please see both the "unofficial" docs and the official website for information regarding projects, and the setup of .sublime-project files. These files are JSON-formatted and contain paths to any folders contained in your project, project-specific settings, and project-specific build systems. This file can (and should) be edited to customize the project to your needs. Double-clicking this file (after associating its file type with Sublime, following the procedure of your operating system) will open the project, any open files within it, and any folders you've added to it (by selecting Project -> Add Folder to Project).
The .sublime-workspace file is also JSON-formatted, but is saved automatically by Sublime and shouldn't be edited unless you really know what you're doing, and even then you probably shouldn't edit it. It contains all sorts of meta information about the project's history in Sublime, which files were open and in what order/pane, previous contents of searches, find/replace, etc., your file history, settings for various plugins like SublimeCodeIntel, and lots more. By default it is hidden when viewing the contents of folders in the Side Bar, and when double-clicked it will try to open the project instead of opening for viewing/editing, so there are several measures in place to prevent your playing with it and potentially screwing up Sublime.
.sublime-project files can be saved wherever you want, but the folders and files contained within it are not necessarily saved in the same place - they stay wherever they were saved. It usually makes sense to save them in the project's root directory, so if you have a filesystem like myhomedir/projects/web/SweetWebsite/ containing html/, js/, and css/ subdirectories, you might want to save your project as .../SweetWebsite/SweetWebsite.sublime-project, just so you know at a glance what files/folders are probably in it. However, you could save SweetWebsite.sublime-project in myhomedir/Desktop for all Sublime cares, and it would work exactly the same way. While it is possible to have unsaved files in a project, of course it's always best to save your work early and often, so you don't lose anything.
Hopefully this helps, please let me know if you have further questions.

Xcode "Cannot parse contents of Info.plist"

I just hit a brick wall with xCode not wanting to parse my Info.plist file. I've replaced the file several times with older (identical) versions of the file that I had previously backed up, and I'm still getting the same error.
Here is the complete error message:
couldn't parse contents of '/Users/...Info.plist': The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format.
I'm clueless on this one. I'm using xCode 5.0.1, Mavericks
This is one of the best way to detect on which line the error is occurring.
Just go the directory where the plist file is present then write this command on terminal->
plutil filename.plist
Another cause of this issue can be from attempting to put URLs (really just slashes etc.) in your app-Info.plist.
Get around it by simply raising the -traditional flag inside of the Info.plist Other Preprocessor Flags option in your project build settings.
I think you have used source-control tools, you can use basic text-edit tool without Xcode to open this plist, command + F to find "<<<<<" or ">>>>>", then you will probably find error string such as:
<<<<<<< .mine
>>>>>>> .r605
select the correct string, and delete the other one, error is resolve!
Looks like replacing the file with a backup, then deleting the derived data for the project in Organizer was the cure. Hope this helps someone else later on.
I personally ruined the file when git merge raised conflicts. .plist is an XML file and git conflict added <<<< and >>>> in there to tag the differences.
Find the .plist file in Finder (in one of your project's folders). Open it in a text editor, find the lines that don't look like proper XML, remove them and be sure to remove the duplicate XML line/node (due to pre and post git recorded changes).
This may also simply happen because you have moved the Info.plist file into a new folder, or removed it from a folder (basically, if its path changed).
Go to Build Settings and search for "Info.plist file". Edit the value. For instance, if you have moved your plist file from the main folder to a subfolder called Resources, you will have to do the following change:
Before:
TargetName/Info.plist
After:
TargetName/Resources/Info.plist
When building for iOS, the Info.plist may be corrupted whenever Default Orientation is set to Auto Rotation. The Info.plist file is created properly on the first build, but subsequent builds results in...
<key>UIInterfaceOrientation</key>
<string></string>
</string>
... at this point Xcode fails to build the project.
I was having the same error, and realized the issue was that I had a URL (e.g. http://example.com/something) as a value in my Info.plist, and I just switched on pre-processing for it (without the -traditional flag). Apparently Xcode will treat the // as a comment marker, and omit the rest of the line.
A work-around I found is to embrace the pre-processor, like so:
http:/${}/example.com/something, which breaks up the // by putting an empty string substation in the middle so it doesn't look like a comment to Xcode, but after pre-processing it's back to a normal URL.
This error comes whenever Xcode preprocessor is not able to parse the info.plist file.
So to find out the error in the specific line do the following steps :
Open your project.xcworkspace in Xcode
Go to the project's navigator
Inside your project click on the info file, if an error exists then it will popup the dialog with the line number where the error exists
You can see the below image of the popup dialog for reference, which is in my case was showing the error on line 35
Hope this will help you or somebody else. Thanks!
Happy Coding :-)

Can I use Xcode as a simple text editor?

Okay ... This may be a ridiculous question. (I'm still getting used to Mac.) I really like the auto fill-in-ahead predictive typing feature of Xcode.
Can I use it to simply edit files laying around different locations on my hard drive? I do not really want to create a project or anything (unless by PROJECT I mean simply loads several files, that are not related to each other, but that I may want to jump back and forth in editing them - I do not want to create a project from files that need to be compiled or anything).
If so, what's the best way to get started? When you open XCode, it asked a lot of wizard questions to get things set up. How would I simply get started to edit 5 or so files at a time ... where I might want to switch back and forth between them - and they are not in the same directory?
All I want to do is simply make changes and save them, make more changes and save again, repeat. Kind of like holding a lot of shell scripts that communicate with each other.
Okay ... so I know this was a silly question - but Xcode is so intimidating for newbies. Sometimes, one needs a place to just get started and I haven't found that yet.
It is possible to open the Xcode text editor on a single file from the command line.
open -a Xcode.app filename.txt
If you're going to use this a lot, you might consider making an alias in your ~/.bashrc.
alias xc="open -a Xcode.app"
As of Xcode 6, you cannot open a directory this way, as it will give you an error message stating that directories must be opened as part of a project. If you provide more than one file on the command line, Xcode appears to create a temporary project containing the files you provided. You can add files and folders to the temporary project, but there doesn't seem to be a way to save the temp project for use later.
If you want to open a file in Xcode, you can also use xed.
As the man page says:
xed -- Xcode text editor invocation tool.
You can simply call xed [file] to launch Xcode editor.
Notepad++ is the way to go. Xcode was never meant to be used as a general text editor.
EDIT: Sorry, didn't know that there wasn't a Mac port for Notepad++. Use TextWrangler instead.

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