Use extended attributes on macOS to save/load text encoding

[gingerbeardman]

Proposal

Use xattr (extended attributes) on macOS to save/load text encoding with file.

BBEdit is the only editor I've found that already does this.

Also you should honour any existing com.apple.TextEncoding when loading and keep it when saving.

Background

• Text Encoding has to either be set manually, or guessed by scanning the file
• Both of these tasks take time

Benefits

• loading time can be reduced
• text encoding can be more persistent
• can still be changed and rewritten at any point

Details

debug command:
xattr -p -l com.apple.TextEncoding "/path/to/file.txt"

output:
file.txt
com.apple.TextEncoding: Shift_JIS;2561

to set xattr (from terminal):
xattr -w com.apple.TextEncoding "Shift_JIS;2561" "/path/to/file.txt"

References

these may help with implementation:

• node: https://github.com/LinusU/fs-xattr
• obj-c & swift: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1719/_index.html

[gingerbeardman]

Any thoughts on this?