- QLStephen – A Mac OS X QuickLook Plugin that lets you view plain text files without a file extension. It is useful for reading files like: README, INSTALL, CHANGELOG, Makefile, Rakefile, CapFile.
- QuickNFO – A Mac OS X QuickLook Plugin for previewing NFO files.
- QuickLook JSON – Useful QuickLook Plugin to preview JSON files. It will render files with a colorful view, and will allow to expand or compress nodes in the JSON tree.
- BetterZip Quick Look Generator – QuickLook inside archives. The currently supported archive formats are: ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt’s SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary.
- QLColorCode – A QuickLook plugin for source code with syntax highlighting.
- QLMarkdown – QLMarkdown is a simple QuickLook generator for Markdown files.
- Quicklook Plugins List
- Our Contributers Who
- How To Package Quicklook Plugins For AppStore
- Quicklook Plugins Location
- Quicklook Plugins Catalina
- Install Plugin Free Download
- Quicklook Plug-ins
We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. See full list on github.com.
Installation tips:
Viscosity 1 5 8 – graphical user interface for openvpn. Copy the .qlgenerator files to /Library/QuickLook or ~/Library/QuickLook. Reload QuickLook plugins with this terminal command: qlmanage -r.
Viscosity 1 5 8 – graphical user interface for openvpn. Copy the .qlgenerator files to /Library/QuickLook or ~/Library/QuickLook. Reload QuickLook plugins with this terminal command: qlmanage -r.
Do you know of other handy QuickLook Plugins? Please do share in the comments!
QuickLook is a simple but powerful feature of macOS that helps to preview the content of a file or folder in Finder without using any particular apps. This feature is very handy when we only want to have brief glance on a certain file or quickly examine its parts instead of opening a full-fledged app for that particular file.
Download Animated GIF QuickLook plugin for free. This is a QuickLook plugin for MacOS-X 10.5/10.6 that allows QuickLook preview of Animated GIFs. The current GIF support in the Finder doesn't show animations. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.
Even nicer, Apple provides API for QuickLook programming and enables the use of plugins that convert a certain document from its native format into QuickLook previewing format. Before, it was also possible to also select and copy text from QuickLook previewing but then Apple removed that feature since macOS 10.11 El Capitan.
QuickLook is well supported in Spotlight search. In Finder, it can be conveniently activated by selecting a file or folder and then, for normal previewing, press Space or ⌘+Y. For full-screen previewing, you can press ⌥+Space (or using ⌘+⌥+Y in case you have ⌥+Space bound to some apps, for instance, Alfred in my case).
We might also use the command
qlmanage
but it works properly with built-in support and has issues with some external plugins.QuickLook Settings
QuickLook looks for and uses the plugins from both system-wide folders ‘/System/Library/QuickLook’ and ‘/Library/QuickLook’ and also the home folder of each user in ‘~/Library/QuickLook'.
A QuickLook plugin is organised in a folder with an extension
.qlgenerator
. The main task of a plugin, as mentioned above, is to generate previewing contents for the corresponding file types. We can see an example of the built-in plugin Image.qlgenerator
.The command
qlmanage
is provided in macOS since the announcement of QuickLook in 2007. It’s very helpful for manipulating QuickLook, for instance, reloading the generators, resetting cache, and many more. We will walk through some handy usage of qlmanage
.Quicklook Plugins List
Forcing reloading the list of generators
Showing the list of generators
This command can be used to see the current QuickLook generators list and also check which generator handles what file types. You might then see a long list of generators in your macOS.
Resetting QuickLook caches
For more usage of
qlmanage
, we can look into its manual.QuickLook Plugins
Looking around, we can easily find a lot of plugins to enhance the built-in support of macOS. Moreover, when we install some applications, there might be included QuickLook plugins too.
Here is a list of plugins that I find very handy and use quite often in my macOS development box.
QLStephen
QLStephen is sort of an awesome Swiss-army-knife that I ever used. It enables the preview of numerous plain text files not handled by the default support of macOS QuickLook, especially files having no extensions such as README, CHANGELOG, Makefile, Rakefile, etc.
If you have already installed Homebrew, it takes only a simple command to install QLStephen (in case you haven’t, please feel free to head to another post).
QLColorCode
I often quickly review my code using this amazing plugin forked/derived from the original one developed by Nathan Gray (n8gray). The preview code will be nicely formatted and highlighted.
The default setting of QLColorCode is totall fine. Nonetheless, you might want to customise some of its settings to your tastes too. Here are some of my favourites.
Here is the result of previewing Java code.
![See See](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fGUmT7H9m0U/maxresdefault.jpg)
QLCommonMark
I have been working with Markdown a lot, especially writing this blog all using Markdown and Hugo generator. It was quite a while I have searched around for a stable QuickLook plugin for Markdown. Before, I used MDD-QuickLook, an excellent fork of the well-known Fletcher‘s original plugin. MDD-QuickLook allows me to customise the look of the Markdown preview using a Github based CSS file
~/.mdqlstyle.css
.When I found QLCommonMark, it replaces MDD-QuickLook with a broader coverage including CommonMark and Markdown and can be configured in the same way, just different filename
~/.cmqlstyle.css
. You can find my Markdown preview style here. Dsd player mac.Our Contributers Who
QuickLook JSON
Both front-end and back-end developers are somehow familiar with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. As JavaScript and its ecosystem are rapidly growing, JSON and its variations become extremely popular. Hence, a QuickLook plugin for JSON should be ready in your macOS dev box.
QuickLook CSV
How To Package Quicklook Plugins For AppStore
CSV is a very popular format due to its simplicity and commonly used in statistics and data analytics. It contains values separated by comma, tabs, semi-colons, or pipes. MacOS provides built-in support for CSV previewing but I prefer a nicer-looking preview with QuickLook CSV developed by Pascal Pfiffner (p2) with alternate row shading.
HetimaZip
There are many formats and standards around for compressing and archiving files such as 7z, bzip2, gzip, rar, zip, to name but a few. HetimaZip can help to look through a Zip archive without unzipping or opening it. Note that, this plugin also support well some file types based on Zip format such as Java ARchive (
.jar
), iOS app (.ipa
), and many more.Unfortunately, HetimaZip cannot handle Android application package (
.apk
). Thus we can combine with another nice plugin, QuickLook APK.There is an alternative to HetimaZip, namely, BetterZip. I have tried both but could not make BetterZip’s work in macOS High Sierra like HetimaZip’s to show the content of a normal Zip file.
Suspicious Package
MacOs applications are sometimes distributed as installer packages (
.pkg
). An installer package may run some scripts and install many files in your systems. A curious and careful user would need to find out what exactly the installation scripts doing and what files are going to be installed.Quicklook Plugins Location
Advanced macOS users can use Show Package Contentsto get inside the package, but it won’t show much details. We can use the app Suspicious Package or its included QuickLook plugin to inspect any installer packages before approving for installation.
Note that it is a tad inconvenient that you have to install the appSuspicious Package only for its plugin. Copying the plugin alone won’t work because it depends on the core libraries for previewing. I’m not quite sure whether this is the developers’ intention or there are actual technical difficulties behind the scene to solely deliver the QuickLook plugin.
Quicklook Plugins Catalina
Install Plugin Free Download
qlImageSize
Quicklook Plug-ins
Normally macOS provides sufficient plugins for quick-looking images. qlImageSize can enhance further by displaying the dimensions and size of the previewed image. These information is only available either when opening the image with an application or selecting the image file and pressing ⌘+I in Finder. I like qlImageSize a lot as many times I just want to quickly see an image’s dimensions and size this way.