Composer Autocorrect just made me want to cry

djdavetrouble
Contributor III

I am not sure what is going on but I have been pulling my hair out because I made a post install script in composer, and when I used a double dash it autocorrected it into a longer dash (??). It looked like a regular dash when I went back to edit so I just added another dash. It wasn't until 2 hours of troubleshooting (command works typed in a shell but not as a postinstall script), and composing an email that I noticed one dash was slightly longer than the other when I pasted the command from composer.

Can I disable this somehow? I have systemwide spelling and smart quotes already disabled. Witness my pain:

/Users/Shared/Sophos9.5.2/Sophos Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/tools/InstallationDeployer —-install
vs. 
/Users/Shared/Sophos9.5.2/Sophos Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/tools/InstallationDeployer --install
3 REPLIES 3

CasperSally
Valued Contributor II

I can't help you, but I love your post title. Thanks for the laugh.

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

That's a really subtle difference. I had to zoom in an look very closely to see that the top line has the longer dashes. I'm not sure why its doing that, but I can say its not the first time. I've struggled with Composer's script editing window in the past as well. JAMF had fixed a number of issues around that, but apparently some are still lingering.

Anyway, one option you can try - creating the core of your script in something like TextWrangler and then copying/pasting into the Composer script window. I have a feeling as long as you don't actually make any edits on that line after pasting it in that it will retain the correct dashes and not reformat them.

In the interim, have you done a right/control click in the script editing window in Composer and checked to make sure the spelling and grammar options under the menu are all disabled? I can't recall if those come from the system wide settings or if they are something specific to Composer. It may be the former, in which you said you did that already. Worth a look though.
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djdavetrouble
Contributor III

Thanks mm2270. Apple adds features faster than I can turn them off. In this case, Composer is totally innocent (sorry JAMF! ). The culprit here was under substitutions: smart dashes. After this incident, I happen to think ALL dashes are stupid.