[MlMt] counter colors

[John Doherty]

On Mon 2023-01-23 09:12 PM MST -0700, <mailmate2 at coopercontent.com> 
wrote:

> $ file ~/Library/Preferences/com.freron.MailMate.plist
>> /Users/XXXX/Library/Preferences/com.freron.MailMate.plist: Apple 
>> binary property list
>>
>> Do not know when "old-style ASCII" plists were superseded by "Apple 
>> binary."
>
> I don't think it's a matter of when. I'm running MailMate 5925 on Mac 
> OS 13.1. I think the "binary" designation is just a way to keep text 
> programs from understanding the file as a text-based file. (BBEdit is 
> one of the few programs that will attempt to open any file you ask it 
> to.)

The plot thickens. It really is a binary file:

[daffy] $ head ~/Library/Preferences/com.freron.MailMate.plist | cat -v
bplist00?^PM-^W^@^A^@^B^@^C^@^D^@^E^@^F^@^G^@^H^@	^@
...

But bbedit does in fact open it just fine. I think it must be doing some 
magic behind the scenes, maybe based on plutil or equivalent. The user 
manual says:

     BBEdit transparently opens and displays the contents of any bz2 or
     gzip-compressed files (“.bz2”, “.gz” and “.gzip” 
files), as well as
     tarballs (“.tar” files) and binary plists (“.plist” files), 
both
     directly and during multi-file search.