What feature did you use:
Attempted to open Markdown files (*.md)
What happened:
Try to Open With on a .md file in my iA Writer iCloud Drive folder → Panda isn’t listed as an option
Try File > Open from within Panda → the .md files are all greyed out and not available (.txt is available normally)
Try open -a Panda my-file.md from the terminal → error popup in Panda:
The document “my-file.md” could not be opened. Panda cannot open files in the “Markdown Document” format.
Notes:
I had just downloaded latest Panda (my old build had expired for too long to auto-update)
Rebooting the Mac doesn’t seem to help.
The app is in /Applications
I deleted and re-downloaded the app, to no avail
mdls -name kMDItemContentTypes /Applications/Panda.app reports kMDItemContentTypes = (null) – is that expected?
But in the app’s Info.plist the CFBundleDocumentTypes still does (of course) list markdown files, identified by the .md suffix, as the first supported type.
Any idea what is possibly going on or how I might fix this? It is obviously a big hindrance to my ability to use Panda!
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
Reboot
Reinstall Panda, through a different path – not Safari with its quarantining, but raw wget https://sf-applications.s3.amazonaws.com/Panda/Panda.zip && unzip Panda.zip && mv Panda.app /Applications/
It still refuses to open .md files.
Doing the same wget download to get a fresh version on my other Mac, meanwhile, works totally fine.
What steps can I take to dig deeper? I am an experienced programmer, so comfortable with arbitrary levels of technical requests/suggestions from the Shiny Frog team, but I’m not a Mac app developer so not very familiar with the vagaries that are likely in play here. Any help much appreciated as this is preventing use of Panda in most of my normal workflows on this machine.
I don’t know what ultimately was the culprit, but inspecting any differences between the two Macs I realized the troublesome one is a desktop which has connected some external backup drives, including one which is an image of an old system, including a full (quite) old /Applications folder. I was vaguely aware that the system had these in the available apps list, but I never used them and they didn’t actually appear much in my regular interactions.
It seems likely one of these was the culprit, as, after disabling Spotlight indexing on this drive (as well as deleting several other unnecessary apps from the main system) and rebuilding the LaunchServices database yet again, Panda suddenly started working as normal with .md files.
Further update
This appeared to fix the problem but the fix was ephemeral. It seems that, with those external apps removed (now disconnected altogether), the lsregister process gets the system back in a state where Panda has the expected filetype associations, but it won’t persist after a reboot.
I am still at a frustrating loss. I’d still love to hear from the devs how they might dig deeper and identify the potential problem.