The Mysterious ~/Documents/BBEdit

[Well, Therefore]

Using BBEdit's menu BBEdit > Folders > Document Backups opens ~Library/Containers/BBEdit/Data/Documents/BBEdit Backups. In Finder, folder ~/Documents contains what appears to be a folder named "BBEdit", within which is what appears to be another folder named "BBEdit Backups."

I have two questions. First, can ~/Documents/BBEdit be removed, or at least hidden. The reason I don't simply move it to the Trash leads to the second question, which is...

... just what is this mysterious entity that looks like ~/Documents/BBEdit? When I use ls -lA ~/Documents, no such item appears. A file entitled .localized exists, but I do not believe this is related. Finder's Get Info on ~/Documents/BBEdit reports that it is a zero byte file and its location is ~/Library/Containers/BBEdit/Data/Documents.

I am very curious. It appears to be something akin to a hard link or symbolic link, but not exactly.

The User Guide cautions against messing with this mysterious entity (humor intended.)

I appreciate in advance anyone who can answer the first question and shed some light on the second.

David Brown

Mac Studio M2 Ultra

macOS 14.2.1

BBEdit 15.0

[Darren Duncan]

A partial answer to your question is that the MacOS does some weirdness with
regards to "Containers", where the Finder or certain apps would fake various
home folders like ~/Documents containing things that are actually in
~/Library/Containers... and so on, though I've seen even the Finder sometimes
shows the same folder as being empty or non-empty depending how I get to it. I
encountered this due to strange behavior I observed when migrating from one Mac
to another.

As to your question about moving this BBEdit folder to the trash, well you can,
but you would probably lose some BBEdit settings in the process, and the folder
would then get recreated for fresh settings.

I feel your best bet is to just take it that this folder is a standard part of
how the MacOS works, leave it alone, and organize your own files around it. For
example, if you used to organize your files within various folders directly
under ~/Documents, then instead make a new "top level" folder like
~/Documents/Foo and put your organization under there instead. Treat
~/Documents as if it were your root home folder ~ where the MacOS organizes it,
and have your own organizing scheme under the Foo, where you can expect nothing
else would mess with it.

-- Darren Duncan

[Well, Therefore]

Darren,

Thank you for the information. I have not seen Finder show files from within ~/Library/Containers for other applications, which lead me to hope that it could be controlled via BBEdit. Perhaps that is not the case.

Regards,

David

[Patrick Woolsey]

On 1/18/24 at 2:36 PM, davidmb...@gmail.com (Well,

Therefore) wrote:

>Using BBEdit's menu BBEdit > Folders > Document Backups opens
>~Library/Containers/BBEdit/Data/Documents/BBEdit Backups. In
>Finder, folder ~/Documents contains what appears to be a folder
>named "BBEdit", within which is what appears to be another
>folder named "BBEdit Backups."
>
>I have two questions. First, can ~/Documents/BBEdit be removed,
>or at least hidden.

It cannot be removed while BBEdit is configured to preserve
historical backups.

>The reason I don't simply move it to the Trash leads to the
>second question, which is...
>
>... just what is this mysterious entity that looks like ~/Documents/BBEdit?

It is an OS fabrication, much as BBEdit's sandbox container
appears to be named "BBEdit" while actually being "com.barebones.bbedit".

>The User Guide cautions against messing with this mysterious
>entity (humor intended.)

Please heed the manual. :-)


Regards

Patrick Woolsey
==
Bare Bones Software, Inc. <https://www.barebones.com/>

[Well, Therefore]

Patrick, I appreciate the explanation.