Quick Look plugins for software development

Quick Look is a quick preview feature developed by Apple for macOS. Quick Look allows users to look at the contents of a file at full or near-full size in the Finder. It can preview files of different file types without even open the file in the related app.

Quick Look already supports multiple file types. But there ist more – especially for software development. Here are some plugins that make Quick Look even better.

Note: some of the plugins might not work instantly after brew install ... when you are on macOS Catalina or later. In this case, it is possible to download the plugin manually and copy the .qlgenerator file to ~/Library/QuickLook. This requires to run qlmanage -r (or a system restart) to enable the plugin.

QLMarkdown

QLMarkdown provides QuickLook support for markdown files (*.md). This plugin renders the markdown content and shows the result. To install QLMarkdown, use:

brew cask install qlmarkdown

For manual installation, the plugin is available at https://github.com/toland/qlmarkdown.

QLStephen

This Quick Look plugin provides a file preview for files without extension, e.g. README, INSTALL, Capfile, CHANGELOG, etc. It can be installed using Homebrew:

brew cask install qlstephen

For manual installation, the plugin is available at https://github.com/whomwah/qlstephen.

QLColorCode

This is a Quick Look plug-in that renders source code with syntax highlighting. To install the plugin, use Homebrew:

brew cask install qlcolorcode

For manual installation, the plugin is available at https://github.com/anthonygelibert/QLColorCode. If you want to configure QLColorCode, there are several defaults commands that are described on the download page.

Quick Look Json

This is a Quick Look plug-in that renders json files. To install the plugin, use Homebrew:

brew cask install quicklook-json

For manual installation, the plugin is available at http://www.sagtau.com/quicklookjson.html.

WebP QuickLook

This is an open-source QuickLook plugin to generate thumbnails and previews for WebP images. To install the plugin, use Homebrew:

brew install webpquicklook

For manual installation, the plugin is available at https://github.com/dchest/webp-quicklook.

Something is missing? Please let me know in the comments, if there are any other plugins that might be helpful for software development.

Photo by Shane Aldendorff on Unsplash