20150114 The dirtiest mistakes of OS X

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+---
+title: "The dirtiest mistakes of OS X"
+date: 2016-01-14T01:02:52-08:00
+date_display: January 14, 2016
+---
+
+I must have written about this elsewhere, but here are my top three:
+
+1. `.DS_Store`. Finder litters faster than one could clean up.
+
+2. HFS+ NFD*.[^nfd] Heard of the cursed encoding `UTF8-MAC`? Pure Evil. Culprit of
+   tons of garbled text issues (especially cross platform ones) and probably
+   most length miscalculation issues. Even Apple's Terminal.app can't do NFD
+   right. I wonder how Korean users navigate their filesystems in terminal.
+
+3. Plist XML. It's XML, but even worse.
+
+[^nfd]: NFD with an asterisk, i.e., not even NFD. According to Apple in
+    [an old Technical Q&A](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/qa/qa1173/_index.html),
+
+    > The terms used in this Q&A, precomposed and decomposed, roughly
+    > correspond to Unicode Normal Forms C and D, respectively. However, most
+    > volume formats do not follow the exact specification for these normal
+    > forms. For example, HFS Plus (Mac OS Extended) uses a variant of Normal
+    > Form D in which U+2000 through U+2FFF, U+F900 through U+FAFF, and U+2F800
+    > through U+2FAFF are not decomposed (this avoids problems with round trip
+    > conversions from old Mac text encodings). It's likely that your volume
+    > format has similar oddities.
+
+    They are conscious enough to call these oddities.