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Not a bug

Supported file extensions for external sources

email 8 years ago in General updated by Michele Vetturi 6 years ago 6

When opening files from external sources (via "Open..."), Textastic (iOS) seems to limit the files that can be selected according the file extensions. For example, for editing Julia source code (extension .jl) I even could install custom syntax highlighting, but cannot select files with ".jl" extension when using iCloud Drive or Transmit as an external source, as the file names with ".jl" extensions are grayed out.

Not a bug

When Textastic invokes the document picker, it limits the types of files to the following system-declared uniform type identifiers: "public.text", "public.plain-text", "public.source-code" and "public.script". This is done because it cannot edit files such as image or video files.


The ".jl" file extension is by default not known to the system so there is no uniform type identifier declared for it. This means that document providers typically do not allow to open such a file.

Ok, I understand. But how can the ".jl" extension be associated with "public.source-code"? Can Textastic do that? If yes, wouldn't it be plausible behavior to register an extension as soon as a ".tmbundle" for a certain file extension is installed?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to add a file type at runtime. All supported file types are defined in an "Info.plist" file which is static and must be defined by the app developer at compile time of the app.

It would be great if there was somehow an override for this. I just learned about external sources and was really impressed with the functionality, until I noticed that most of the files I wanted to edit were greyed out. File extensions can be a useful hint to the user, but config files and scripts on linux systems typically don't have an extension.


Is there any way to just enable editing files with no extension, while still leaving e.g. ".jpg" greyed out?

I don't think that's possible with how the system currently works.

I resurrect this topic because I have the same issue using Git2Go. I’m trying to edit an Asciidoctor source file (*.adoc) but I can’t send it to Textastic. Is anyone working on this issue? Thank you.