[MlMt] counter colors

[John Cooper]

John Doherty via mailmate wrote (at 8:39 PM on Monday, January 23, 2023):

> 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 Do not know when "old-style ASCII" plists were superseded by "Apple binary."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.

Interesting! So - my method will only work if you actually use BBEdit and not another text editor.

I also occasionally use a Mac app called "Prefs Editor" to browse and edit a .plist file. It's still available at http://apps.tempel.org/PrefsEditor/.