Improve Finder’s QuickLook with plugins

This blog post is a sort of Public Service Announcement for all the MacOS users who don’t know about QuickLook plugins.

MacOS’s file explorer Finder has a handy feature Quick Look that allows you to quickly preview a file without opening it. However, on default it supports a rather limited amount of popular file formats.

For example, trying to QuickLook an .afdesign file gives the default “preview not available” info box:

For text files, the default is to show plain text preview regardless of the underlying format like with Markdown:

Luckily, it’s extendable by plugins.

I use sbarex’s QLMarkdown for rendering Markdown files. It has a lot of configurable options and themes if you need something specific but has sensible defaults for quickly checking out your Markdown files.

Here’s an example QuickLook of README.md for nhl-235:

Another example is video files. .mp4 and .mov files preview nicely by default but .mkv and .webm videos don’t.

I use Oil3’s QLCodec for mkv files and their Webm-QuickLook-Plug-In for webm. Apparently the QLCodec should also work for webm but I had installed the latter earlier before I discovered my need for mkv previews so I have both for now.

sindresorhus has a nice list of plugins so if you’re looking for something specific that you need to preview regularly, check it out.