pathname errors

[ngazidja]

Hi all,

Given that there doesn't seem to be anyone at Nisus any more, maybe someone here can help. I have my home folder on an external drive. Normally I have no problems opening Nisus files that are in File>Open recent, but recently (probably since upgrading to Tahoe 26.5) I can no longer do this, Nisus is having trouble with the pathnames. So I get:

The file "foobar.rtf" could not be opened.

Bookmark data previously captured for a file is invalid.
File path: /Volumes/home disk/Users/John/Working Folder/Folder2/foobar.rtf:
/Volumes/home disk/Users/John/Working Folder/Folder2/foobar.rtf

Or, if it was a doc file being converted:

The file “foobar.doc” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file. [NSCocoaErrorDomain code 260]:
/Volumes/home disk/Users/John/Working Folder/Folder2/foobar.doc

Any suggestions? Might this be an OS problem? It doesn't happen in ay other apps.

[Þorvarður]

Perhaps a problem with system sandboxing? Martin described how to fix it here:
https://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10518

[ngazidja]

Thanks for the suggestion but... there's no file at ~/Library/Containers/com.nisus.NisusWriter in my system. Nothing nisus in ~/Library/Containers/, in fact, I did a search for any filename nisus in my Library folder and nothing at all. So I searched the entire Mac, internal and external drives, nothing. Very strange.

[ngazidja]

I meant the last search, nothing like com.nisus.NisusWriter on the Mac, obviously there were some results. Like NWP itself...

[Bob Stern]

When you say your MacOS user folder is on an external drive, I assume you mean that your internal drive remains the startup volume. Having a user account home folder not on the startup volume is known to be more problematic in Tahoe than previous version versions of MacOS. I suggest that you try Nisus with another user account that’s in its standard location on the startup volume. You should be able to keep all your data on the external drive, using aliases or symlinks to the user folder if some program requires it.

[ngazidja]

Yes, indeed, startup volume is the internal drive in all cases - I have a Mac Mini at home, an old iMac (maybe?) at work and a laptop for when I'm away from both. I did try setting up the external drive as the boot drive (which I used to do many years ago) but the OS wasn't going to do that, Apple obviously decided they didn't want people doing that.
All my applications are on the internal drive (yes, problems otherwise) but, I wonder, what if did the opposite and had Nisus on the external SSD? I might try that.
The problems only seem to occur when switching to and from my work Mac, which is stuck on Monterey. Between my home Mac Mini and my laptop, both running Tahoe, I have no problems.

[ngazidja]

Well that solved that problem, I placed a copy of NWP on my external drive and using that I have no pathname errors.

[ngazidja]

I spoke too soon. I took my external drive home, didn't use it and then took it back to work. So no intervening launch of Nisus and of course no problems. But once I launched on a different Mac...

[Bob Stern]

When you are moving your external drive among 3 different Macs, it's not surprising that the Finder (not just Nisus) would be confused if you are identifying the path to a document as being in your "home folder", since your user account on each Mac has a different home folder. I expect you'd solve the problem by moving your Nisus documents to a new volume on the external drive that is not the one with your home folder. (Initially, paths pointing to your home folder would be wrong, of course.) You can avoid permissions problems by doing Get Info on the new volume and ticking the checkbox "Ignore ownership on this volume".

If the external drive is APFS format, the new volume should be a new APFS logical volume, not a new partition.

[ngazidja]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion, but Finder has no problems, nor does any other app, it's only Nisus, and it only started recently - never had any problems before about early May, and I've had this setup for 3 years or so now. My home folder is the same on all my Macs, viz. "/Volumes/home disk/Users/John/"
And, yes, I have ignore ownership.
So still a mystery...