BBEdit : My Text is Blank !


Background

As you probably already know, I'm a big fan of BBEdit, this is - to me - the best text editor for macOS. It has all the features that I'm expecting from a text editor. Especially, when you are a coder, you want a reliable development environment. I'm not going to argue here why BBEdit is the best in class, if you are here, you are probably already convinced. The reason why you are here is because, all of a sudden, you cannot use it anymore because all lines of codes are blank !

Easy fix

So, last night, I was trying to open on of my codes, I simply cannot see the lines of my file. Very weird behavior.


You have the feeling that there are content (you can see the line numbers) but this is just like if the background and foreground color were the same. I tried to look at the themes and color configuration but nothing changed.

Hopefully the BBEdit support is reactive and efficient. I appears that it is a macOS bug ! Can you believe this ? It seem that if you have started a backup operation (in my case it was Time Machine) before starting BBEdit it could happen.

In brief: certain file system conditions cause a failure during initialization of the macOS font subsystem. This in turn renders the OS incapable of loading any fonts, and consequently no text is displayed.

Solution is, either wait or stop the running backup and start a terminal window and issue the following commands : 

~$ atsutil server -shutdown
ATSServer shutdown
~$ sudo atsutil databases -remove
Password:
Removing: /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n00000c4000031/C/com.apple.FontRegistry
Removing: /var/folders/3w/pbq2sr4x2h35yjg4xz14txqm0000gn/C/com.apple.FontRegistry
~$ atsutil server -ping
Session Contents Restored on 28 Oct 2020 at 17:13

~$ sudo reboot

After restarting the machine, start BBEdit and ... yeah ! coding can continue.

Thanks a lot to Bare Bones Software Technical Support

Hope this helps ;)

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