I have noticed that my new .plist file has an extended attribute (indicated by the @ at the end of the permissions listing as seen by ls -all). Calling:
$ xattr -l default_smart.plist
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000 2A 2A 2A 2A 48 64 72 61 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ****Hdra........
0010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

com.apple.TextEncoding: MACINTOSH;0
And in fact this .plist file has a file icon of the application I edited it with. I don't think the file icon really screws up things but the text encoding just might.

Trying to remove the extended attribute with:
$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo default_smart.plist
No such xattr: com.apple.FinderInfo
That is strange.

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I am still a bit surprised where it picked up the file encoding 'MACINTOSH:0', but removing it did not fix anything.

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I get:

$ xattr -l default_smart.plist
com.apple.TextEncoding: UTF-8;134217984

Additionally,

$ ls -el@ default_smart.plist
-rw-r--r--@ 1 me me 1456 Feb 29 19:46 default_smart.plist
com.apple.TextEncoding 15

I get nothing dealing with com.apple.FinderInfo or MACINTOSH;0

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Just blame SubEthaEdit, it added the file icon and generally does funny stuff with file encodings.

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