MacOS – TextEdit shows dialogs about not having permission to open any files

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About once per day, TextEdit starts showing dialogs like this when I try to open any file:

The document “test.txt” could not be opened. You don’t have permission.

To view or change permissions, select the item in the Finder and choose File > Get Info.

There's usually messages like this in system.log:

9/13/12 10:41:42.952 PM sandboxd[21081]: ([357]) TextEdit(357) deny file-read-data /Users/lauri/Desktop/test.txt
9/13/12 10:41:55.118 PM TextEdit[357]: NSFileVersion tried to tried to add a new generation and failed. Versioned file URL: file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/temp.txt, contents URL: file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/temp.txt.sb-de6477ff-BhVNrq, error: Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"
9/13/12 10:41:55.118 PM TextEdit[357]: NSDocument failed to preserve the old version of a document. Here's the error:
Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"
9/13/12 10:41:55.119 PM TextEdit[357]: <Document: 0x7f971d00a510>: An error occurred while attempting to preserve the backup file at file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/temp.txt.sb-de6477ff-BhVNrq: Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"

I can't open any files until I quit and reopen TextEdit. I also have to delete the backup files (like temp.txt.sb-de6477ff-BhVNrq) manually.

I've had the issue on two different installations. I have tried deleting the sandbox container and repairing permissions from the recovery partition. Does anyone know what's going on?

Best Answer

I ended up replacing TextEdit's code signature with an ad-hoc signature:

sudo codesign -f -s - /Applications/TextEdit.app/

It disables sandboxing, so for example the preference files are in ~/Library/Preferences/ instead of the sandbox container.

Edit: The dialogs returned after I reinstalled OS X, and now I'm getting errors like this for codesign -f -s -:

$ sudo codesign -f -s - /Applications/TextEdit.app/
/Applications/TextEdit.app/: replacing existing signature
/Applications/TextEdit.app/: object file format unrecognized, invalid, or unsuitable

I'm using https://github.com/jjgod/TextEditPlus for now. It's based on a version of TextEdit that came with 10.7, but it works with 10.8.2.

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