TextEdit leaving behind weird folders on SMB

2023-01-23

When saving text files to an SMB server with TextEdit on macOS, you may run into this issue where it leaves behind a ton of directories every save, like so:

name-of-text-file.txt
name-of-text-file.txt.sb-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxx

Where xs are replaced by some random string of characters and numbers.

And sometimes, TextEdit will completely fail to save a file.

Well, it might be because you’re disallowing dot files on your SMB server with something like the following configuration:

# Get rid of macOS dot files crap (fuck you macOS)
veto files = /._*/.DS_Store/

While this does disallow macOS dot files it also breaks saving with TextEdit, because these .sb directories house ._name-of-text-file.txt files, which is presumably used to save file attributes.

I dislike TextEdit doing this, and I’m pretty sure there is some solution to turn off the functionality, but since this is a server used by multiple people, many of whom are tech illiterate, I just decided to remove those lines from the configuration. Damn you, macOS.