busybee fluffy rambles

Somehow some of my settings got corrupted, which caused Photoshop and Illustrator to no longer actually update their windows normally. It only affected those programs, but unfortunately I need those programs to make art.

It only affected my main user account, though; a test account I set up worked just fine.

So I reported this to the official Photoshop forum and the only response I got was telling me to do a “spring cleaning” and switch to a new user account (with an assumption that I’d been migrating my account between computers but no, I only migrate my user files for this very reason). Which is a hecking pain in the butt and I didn’t want to do that, but no amount of resetting any preferences I could find (including clearing out everything Adobe-related from my $HOME/Library directory) fixed a damn thing.

So, fine, I decided to make a new user account and transfer my existing stuff to it. But this has also gotten needlessly difficult in macOS; due to the whole Gatekeeper security thing, even running as root I couldn’t simply move my Library directory out of the way, because holy cow macOS sandboxing rules are invasive and pervasive now.

So I tried making a new account and moving all of my user files into it, but that didn’t work because of similar sandboxing problems!

So instead I deleted this test account and my old account and then set up a new account with the same name and home directory as the old account, and that ended up blowing away a bunch of my files (partially my fault, because I’d forgotten that I did manage to move some of my files into the test account first, oops), and blahhhhrgh. Fortunately I was able to retrieve everything I cared about from my backups, but I sure had a Moment of Panic.

Anyway, long story short, I basically just spent all evening re-setting-up my computer as if it were brand new, with the added fun of recovering random files from my NAS.

Oh, and Time Machine volumes over a NAS are also ridiculously slow and for some reason Finder makes it as difficult as possible to deal with that too; mounting the .sparsebundle file doesn’t make it act like a normal volume for some reason, so I couldn’t do anything from Terminal, and I had to slowly and painfully browse everything in the Finder, which only showed things in that weird view where you can’t put it into the full “details” mode and there’s no toolbar and opening a folder opens a whole new window. What the heck.

I’m also not entirely sure I still have everything.

But at least my Photoshop works, for now. Who knows how long that will last, though…

And of course now I also have to re-set-up all of my sound stuff. Which is already fragile and hard to rememer what goes where.

It’s getting to the point where you basically need a separate computer for every different “pro” application.

Update: So it turns out there’s an easy fix for the sandboxing rules. As I learned when I had to repeat this very same process on my laptop where the Adobe window painting problem happened again. Fucking computers.