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I have text clippings (.textClipping) from various previous Mac systems ranging through System 8 and all the various OS X versions.

On BigSur, these appear blank. On previous systems they also appeared blank, but (weirdly) I could still cut'n'paste the text, but not with BigSur.

I've tried:

  1. a heavily-promoted site (loaded with annoying pop-ups) that promised to convert them online, but no result.
  2. using DeRez in devTools (as another answer suggested) to no avail.

I do have older Macs with previous OS X versions, but I really need a way to extract the text from a modern Mac - there must be a load of people with the same issue!

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Text clippings are still a valid and supported format: I can create them and view them in MacOS Monterey.

Interestingly, if I change the file format to .txt or .rtf, they remain 'clippings' -- opening into a window in the Finder itself, rather than as document in TextEdit or other.

enter image description here

This window is copyable.

You can open the file in a text editor, like BBEdit, and may be able to glean the contents from the RTF and XML data inside.

But I suspect that your files may be corrupted in some way. It's possible that the early versions of these files were resource fork data, which has since been stripped from the file.

EDIT: I've performed a quick test: open Sheepshaver, the Classic Mac OS emulator, and create a text clipping in OS 9. Zip it (with DropStuff!), transfer to Monterey disk, unzip.
There is nothing there: the file is 0Kb.

It's likely that old textclippings are no longer supported. I would begin the process of converting all your clippings on your older Macs as soon as possible.

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  • TextMate is also a great text editor! I found that the old textClipping files will open in an earlier version of OS X - even after Rosetta was dropped - but the same files don't show up at all in BigSur. The resource fork (if they're from pre-OS X, which they may be) appears to be stripped in later versions of OS X. Guessing, but nothing in any text editor. I still have my white iMac, so using duplicates left on that machine to convert them to text files before moving over.
    – Dave Everitt
    Commented Dec 22, 2021 at 19:52
  • yes, old textClippings had a resource fork, and (I think) pre-rosetta OS X systems could still read them, but post-rosetta systems strip the resource fork - sometimes, you can hit the space bar and read the preview even when they're empty, as the icon is created from the original text
    – Dave Everitt
    Commented May 3, 2022 at 17:02

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