Old-Style ASCII Property List Syntax Support for Sublime Text

March 21, 2022 • 1 minute read

I published a package which provides syntax definitions for old-style ASCII property lists in Sublime Text.

As mentioned in my earlier post about publishing a resource strings syntax support package for Sublime Text I am using Sublime Text as my sidekick for Xcode. It is more convenient in handling certain tasks on a less abstract level.

In some occasions I need to edit the Xcode project files by hand. I mean exactly those files you usually do not want to see in the list of conflicts in version control. The *.pbxproj files.

It took me some time to realize they actually are property lists in a very old format. Another heritage from the NextStep era. They are property lists but in an odd representation, the old-style ASCII format. Nowadays mainly the XML-based format is common. There also is the binary property list format but I have rarely encountered it thus far.

There was some back and forth with the naming as well as the packaging of this feature. Initially it was referring to the project builder project file suffix and published separately on package control. Then I merged them with other Xcode related packages just to realize they are not restricted to Xcode shortly after.

You can find my package here on Package Control and here on GitHub.

About The Author

Peter Thomas Horn is a professional software developer at Open-Xchange specialized on the Apple platform. He previously worked a decade across the full stack of various web technologies. Originally started with Java on Windows at the age of 12 years. While staying humble in throwing around buzzwords like "VR" and "machine learning" he occasionally experiences problems and the fitting solutions considered worth sharing.