OS X: Quick Look for Groovy

Update: The info in this post is deprecated, check out my post Quick Look for Groovy with Syntax Highlighting.


Quick Look is one of the coolest features of OS X Leopard.

Unfortunately it only supports a limited range of file types.
I blogged before how I got Quick Look to display .properties files.

Lately I am playing a lot with Groovy... and .groovy files are also not supported by Quick Look out of the box.

Finally I got Quick Look working to show .groovy files. But it has been quite a hassle.

In the following I am using TextMate, but this should also work with another text-editor like Smultron or TextEdit.

This is what I did:

I navigated into the TextMate package (right-click->Show Package Contents).

I edited Contents/Info.plist with a text-editor.

I added the follwing snippet at the end of Info.plist (just before the ending </dict> </plist>)

	
	UTExportedTypeDeclarations
  
    
      UTTypeConformsTo
      
        public.text
			public.plain-text
      
      UTTypeDescription
      Code
      UTTypeIdentifier
      com.macromates.textmate
      UTTypeTagSpecification
      
        com.apple.ostype
        TEXT
        public.filename-extension
        
          properties
          groovy
        
      
    
  

Then I set TextMate as the default editor for .groovy files.

Then I did the following steps on the command-line, without really knowing what they do. Probably not all of them are necessary:

touch /Applications/TextMate.app

qlmanage -r

touch ~/Library/QuickLook/QLColorCode.qlmanager

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -f -v ~/Library/QuickLook/QLColorCode.qlmanager

The result is that QuickLook at least displays .groovy files as plain text:

Next on the wishlist would be syntax-highlighting. Unfortunately this does not work with the qlcolorcode-plugin since Highlight does not support Groovy.

Last tip: To find out which Quick Look generator is configured for a file type you can use the following command: qlmanage -p Greet.groovy 2>&1 | grep 'Generator used'

I collected these infos mainly from here and here.

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