Improving Leopard's QuickLook

Leopard's new "Quicklook" is a nice tool, but for stubborn old command line types like me, it has some limitations: it won't show me plain text files unless they have the extension ".txt". It's possible that somewhere there's a preference you could add to Quicklook, but I haven't heard of it yet.

There is another way to make Quicklook show "unknown" files: you can mess with the files Info.plist as explained at this MacOSXhints.com 10.5: Add Quick Look support for certain file formats post. But that's really only useful once you realize you WANT to look at the file; I wanted something more automatic.

A simple command line script does the job for me. I call it "looky":

#!/bin/bash
qlmanage -p -c public.plain-text "$@" 2> /dev/null &
 

(I modified that from a MacOSXhints.com post.)

Not much to it, is there? All it does is force Quicklook to interpret the file as plain text. We could make it fancier if we wanted by checking to see if we need to add the "-c public.plain-text", but for my command line use, this is fine - I don't need anything smarter.

But perhaps you do, so here's the "smart" version:

#!/bin/bash
# "smart" Quicklook script by http://aplawrence,com
if [ "$1" = "-f" ]
then
   shift
   qlmanage -p -c public.plain-text "$@" 2> /dev/null &
   exit 0
fi
for file in "$@"
do
   if [ "${file##*.}" = "$file" ]
   then
      qlmanage -p -c public.plain-text   "$file" 2> /dev/null &
   else
      qlmanage -p   "$file" 2> /dev/null &
   fi
done
 

That let's us add a "-f" if we absolutely want to force the issue. but otherwise uses "ordinary" Quicklook for files with extensions, and forces them to be interpreted as text if there is no extension.

Put this in ~/bin, chmod 755 it, and at a Terminal prompt, use "looky filenames or wildcards" to see it in action.

By the way, on my own system I would not have bothered with all the extraneous quotes around "$file" - the only reason those are there is because of files with spaces in their names, and I would never create such a thing on my machine.

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Thu Dec 13 12:27:38 2007: Subject: file names containing space   anonymous


Of course, you could add:



IFS='

'



to deal with the problems about files containg spaces in their names.



Thu Dec 13 12:54:13 2007: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Yes, I guess you could - though to my mind, spaces just do not belong in file names period.. :-)



Wed May 13 16:44:16 2009: Subject:   krimb1


Just found your nice script for QuickLook-ing plain text files! Maybe I missed something, but is there someway to QuickLook these files without launching it from terminal with the "looky" command?



Wed May 13 16:51:14 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Yes, see the MacOSXhints.com reference in the second paragraph.



Wed May 13 17:05:45 2009: Subject:   krimb1


Haha, wow sorry to overlook that!

Maybe I'm asking too much, but is there any way to modify the AppleScript to work with LaunchBar rather than Quicksilver? LaunchBar to me is much cleaner and zippy and I don't have any intention of going back to Quicksilver anytime soon.. Thanks in advance!



Wed May 13 17:08:28 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


You may not be asking too much, but you are asking the wrong person - I know NOTHING about Launchbar.



Wed May 13 17:11:17 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


And by the way: it's NOT Applescript and it's NOT Quicksilver :-)

Not that it matters for your question; just to forestall someone elses confusion.

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Wed May 13 18:15:28 2009: Subject:   krimb1


Oops, my mistake! ^^

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