Weird permission problems in TextEdit

I’ve found the opening error issue with both TextEdit and Preview under El Capitan. Is there any way to permanently prevent this opening error occurring?

If it's the autosave process at fault and it sounds like it, then perhaps I should disable it if no better solution?

defaults write com.apple.TextEdit ApplePersistence -bool no

Else:

<dict>

<key>ApplePersistence</key>

<false/>

Just today TextEdit decided to have one of its permissions tantrums, disallowing me to open any text file. I run apps 24/7 and last thing I need is to interrupt those apps or my activities whilst I am in the middle of working. I don't want to be periodically pressured into a reboot. 6 months of using El Capitan has been both good and bad.

I cannot understand the logic of Preview’s minimum width of showing images. Nothing uglier than having grey borders filling up my screen when I’m attempting to compare multiple images and it also limits the number of images that can be placed side by side. But as hinted elsewhere, Apple is unlikely to fix these issues. Though with the iMacPro & next year's return of the MacPro, perhaps they will consider fixing some of these bugs.

ok, this is years after this post first appeared, but I have been having this issue with Sierra. I have been wondering if it has to do with iCloud and TextEdit because I was able to save a TextEdit file to iCloud when I could not to my desktop, or documents folder or in my dropbox files. So I went to System Preferences>iCloud and un-ticked Text Edit for iCloud Drive (because I do not use it that way anyways). And then I moved it via Finder to where I wanted it.

Not sure if that helped but was worth contributing to the conversation. It did not immediately but after I restarted I can now work with the file - although restarting has typically helped when I run into issues with saving or opening TextEdit files and getting the Permission errors even though I as user have permission.

It's a bug in TextEdit, and one of the most annoying bugs in the Mac environment. There's almost certainly nothing wrong with your file permissions. For some reason, TextEdit randomly loses track of them. While this is happening, other editors (TextWrangler, Emacs, etc) can save files to the same folders without issue. Restarting seems to clear up the TextEdit problem, until it randomly starts happening again.

Supposedly, the issue comes from TextEdit being a sandboxed app, and it doing something wrong when trying to auto-save the document, probably because it tries to save to a global location where sandboxed apps are not allowed to write to. This should be rather easy to fix, but Apple is obviously too busy getting incredibly rich with their iOS project and has little love for the Mac platform any more.

Yes, that did work for me, too. Supposedly, Text Edit has its own folder for that, inside its sandbox folder under ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit, but I guess that if there's also a "Autosave Information" folder present at ~/Library, then it prefers that, and then gets an error because it has no permissions to save it there. As soon as the "Autosave Information" is deleted from the user's Library folder, this problem goes away. However, other apps may later again recreate this folder, and then the issue is back for TextEdit, I guess.

Note my other comment mentioning the "Autosave Information" folder inside the Library folder. If that's deleted, the issue gets resolved. Though, there's a chance that folder will later reappear, and then TextEdit will act up again.

There might be something wrong with the file itself. You could use cat in Terminal and send the contents of the old (current) file into a new file and use rm to remove the old file. Then you could you mv to rename the new file's name to the old file's name and chmod to give you full access and others limited access.

i.e. - if the file you're having trouble with is called original.txt you could use (btw, I'm using sudo because their might be a problem with permissions):

sudo cat original.txt > copy.txt

sudo rm original.txt

sudo mv copy.txt original.txt

sudo chmod 755 original.txt

If the problem persists, let me know.

Hmm... Try this.

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

It will take 5-10 minutes to run. Let me know what happens.

Joshua Fruhlinger2 wrote:

The problem started up roughly around the time I started creating symbolic links via MacDropAny (http://www.zibity.com/macdropany) so that I could sync some of my folders via DropBox, and I thought that might be related, but I have noticed the problem even when using folders not synced in this way

Can you completely disable MacDropAny and see what happens?

By the way, repair permissions is not going to fix anything. It has no affect on user files.

TextEdit is really my everyday text editor of choice and I'm finding this problem quite irrirtating.

First time I ever heard anyone say that. Why anyone would choose textedit over a real text editor like BBEdit (or little brother TextWrangler) is beyond me.

This happens nearly every day to me. I lose the last modification, quit TextEdit, and relaunch it and the problem goes away.

Another weird thing w/ TextEdit has now developped: local files get a strange code appended to the filename. (This code disappears once uploaded to a website.)

For example: //Active/client.org/index.html#.UGyL6xiL0Z5

Anyone know how to get rid of this?

I have the same (or similar) issue and here's a theory: it's related to MS Word. Seems like the issue for me pops up after running a Word update using the Microsoft AutoUpdate app (and Installler). I'm running MS Office 2011 v14.2.4.

It's happened before and plagued me for a bit then went away. I tried all the usual remedies and can't remember which ended up fixing it, but I know it wasn't a simple permissions repair.

11-17-12. I am having the exact same problem; including the intermittency of it. I am using a MacBook AIr with Mountain Lion. Two Apple Senior Advisors were unable to remedy. Now in the hands of Apple Engineering. Haven't heard from them for 4 working days. A System Reboot did not fix the problem. We also "repaired permissions". I am not using MacDropAnything, The problem seemed to arise all on its own. I do have Office for Mac 2011 installed. The problem occurs in many, many files. New ones. old ones, converted rtx (AOL) files, etc. The Folder Permissions error message pops up, but goes away after pressing "OK", and then I can continue with the file and save it just fine.

I want to instantaneously create plain text files with minimal functionality (italics, font, underline). I don't need any html or code maniupulation. I use over 10,000 text files. My office is nearly paperless. Notepad is too simple, Microsoft Word is too slow and feature rich. I want a simple text box with minimal menu bars taking up space. Text Edit has these features. Does anyone know of a simple application that replicates it and is reliable on Mountain Lion? Joshua, have you fixed this problem??