¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

You may be familiar with Quick Look on macOS.

On Finder, select a file, then press the space bar. A preview pop-up appears, wherein you can take a quick glance at the file contents.

Out-of-the-box many file formats are supported, even for images.

For developers, two popular formats are not supported:

• markdown
• yaml

I’ve been using qlmarkdown for markdown, and it works well. There’s a homebrew package for it: brew install --cask qlmarkdown.

Lately I wanted to add YAML as well. I found PreviewYaml. It’s MIT-Licensed and open source, but there’s no pre-built package for it, and it is not on homebrew either. The author provides an app in the macOS App Store, but it’s not free.

Upon digging deeper, I found https://github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight. It supports pretty much every popular extension you’ll need as a developer (including .yaml!). There’s a package for it:

% brew install --no-quarantine syntax-highlight

It is simple and works as advertised.

Should I uninstall qlmarkdown then? Not really:

Markdown files (.md, .rmd): please use QLMarkdown which allows you to choose whether to display formatted output or the highlighted source code.

Markdown files are not supported

This is a deliberate choice. Most users want to see the formatted output and not the source code of their markdown files. If you need to view the markdown files (also with the possibility of choosing whether to show the formatting or the source code) I have developed QLMarkdown.

How nice! It turns out both extensions were developed by the same author. Thank you, @sbarex!