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MacOS uses QuickLook preview to highlight arbitrary code source files

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Many source files, such as Flutter.dart files, YAML.yaml,.yml, CocoaPods Podfile, podfile.lock, etc., do not support quick viewing with Spaces by default.

QuickLook doesn’t work even though you can double click on the file to open it through VSCode, Android Studio, etc., by right-clicking the file, showing introduction -> Open mode.

Ordinary.h,.cpp and other source files although the system is recognized, but there is no code highlighting, blind.

Installing a plug-in

Fortunately, there are tons of open source plugins that do this without having to reinvent the wheel.

GitHub Project link: github.com/sindresorhu…

Other information about the QuickLook Plugin:

• sspai.com/post/31927

• zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/57203915

Refer to the two links above for an introduction to QuickLook without further ado.

For the need to highlight preview source files discussed in this article, we can install QLColorCode for code highlighting and QLStephen for previewing files without suffix names.

Installation via Homebrew is recommended for centralized management.

brew cask install qlcolorcode

brew cask install qlstephen
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Note that if the macOS version is 10.15 Catalina or later, you need to perform additional operations after installing the plug-in

xattr -r ~/Library/QuickLook

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/QuickLook

To resolve the problem of not running the QuickLook plugin

Add extension files

However, even if QLColorCode is installed in the plugin, there is no way to view files such as.dart that are not recognized by the system

Open the ~ / Library/QuickLook/QLColorCode qlgenerator/Contents/Info. The file

Find DocumentTypes > Item 0 > Document ContentType UTIs (CFBundleDocumentTypes > Item 0 > LSItemContentTypes

Click ➕ to add a one-line.dart file format, as shown in the image above

com.apple.disk-image-dart
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It takes effect immediately after saving. Other types of files can also be previewed by this method.

But how do you check the type of a particular file format?

By this command

mdls -name kMDItemContentType ./main.dart
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I can get the file type that was passed in

kMDItemContentType = "com.apple.disk-image-dart"
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The common source files are added into the ~ / Library/QuickLook/QLColorCode qlgenerator/Contents/Info. The plist, production efficiency greatly improve 💪

reference

1. medium.com/@claudmarot…

2. Github.com/anthonygeli…

3. Github.com/whomwah/qls…