QuickLook in Finder for files associated with BBEdit

[Matthew Dahlman]

I'd like to be able to preview all text files using QuickLook in Finder. Functionally, this means I could hit <space> and get a useful preview of a file in the popup window that appears. Likewise, the same preview behavior is visible when you bring up file info by right-clicking in the Finder and selecting "Get Info".

Does anyone know if there is a way to force all files associated with BBEdit to have a useful text preview?

Here's the current behavior that I see.

Notice that both files are associated with BBEdit. This is good.

But the file on the left, with the extension "semkey", has what I call a non-useful preview.

The file on the right, with the extension "yaml", has a useful preview.

Previously I had a non-useful preview for both filetypes. I installed QLStephen to attempt to solve this. It seems that later MacOS releases like Catalina have tightened security such that QLStephen doesn't work "out of the box" as easily as it did in the past. Installing it was not sufficient. But manually adding <string>public.yaml</string> in the relevant place in the Info.plist file solves the problem for .yaml files. Hooray!

But manually adding <string>public.semkey</string> in the relevant place does nothing to help with my non-standard .semkey extension. Presumably this is because "semkey" is not a thing in the way that "yaml" is registered as a thing. There's an important lack of precision in that last sentence... but I lack the relevant knowledge to make it better. 

So getting back to the initial question, are other BBEdit users able to preview all of their text files in a useful way?

Because the file "Kind" is "BBEdit.app Document", it seems reasonable that perhaps BBEdit can facilitate the preview. No?

Thanks for any advice,

Matt

[Alfredo]

Any news/updates on this? 

Thanks.

Alfredo

[Gerald Davenport]

I would also like to know as css does not have a preview when doing a quicklook on it as well as get info.

- gerald

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[Gregory Shenaut]

The only thing that has worked for me is to avoid idiosyncratic dot-style (.) extensions in favor of dash-style ones (-). For example, in your case, use foobar-semkey instead of foobar.semkey. IMHO this dependence on dot extensions to determine file type is one of the most embarrassing things about macOS.

The change they made not long ago to a generalized method dealing with them killed off the idea of a universal default, which used to be a way of working around it for quicklooking text files.

Greg

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This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or need technical support, please email "sup...@barebones.com" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/bbedit>
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