Enhancing Quick Look

I fell in love with Quick Look, the new feature in OS X Leopard (Love on first Look?):

It is very useful to quickly skim through your directories... just hit space and have a look!

However, as it comes out of the box it's not yet very useful for a programmer, since for a lot of file types there is no useful preview-generator ...

Fortunately there are several possibilities to extend/enhance the Quick Look functionality:

The most convenient is downloading a generator and installing it into /Library/QuickLook or ~/Library/QuickLook. After putting a generator into one of those directories you have to wait some time, until the new generator is recognized. If you are impatient, you can execute qmanage -r in a terminal.

A good source for Quick Look Plugins is qlplugins.com

But I still could not use Quick Look to look at my .properties-files. These are plain text-files, but you have to tell this to Quick Look. I achieved this by adding the following passage to the Info.plist of TextMate (-> Show Contents).

  <!-- inserted jb, 2080119 for QuickLook improvement -->
  <key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
      <array>
        <string>public.text</string>
        <string>public.plain-text</string>
      </array>
      <key>UTTypeDescription</key>
      <string>Properties in plain text</string>
      <key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
      <string>com.macromates.textmate</string>
      <key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
      <dict>
        <key>com.apple.ostype</key>
        <string>TEXT</string>
        <key>public.filename-extension</key>
        <array>
          <string>properties</string>
        </array>
      </dict>
    </dict>
  </array>

Then you have to touch /Applications/TextMate.app/ on a terminal. The same should work for any other text-editor.

I found this last tip here.