quick-look-plugins
List of useful Quick Look plugins for developers
A curated list of Quick Look plugins that extend macOS file preview support to handle code, JSON, Markdown, video, and other file types.
Quick Look is a built-in macOS feature that lets you preview a file's contents by pressing the spacebar in Finder, without opening any application. By default it handles common file types like images and PDFs, but developers often work with files it cannot preview — source code, JSON, video formats, Markdown, and others.
This repository is a curated list of plugins that extend Quick Look to support additional file types. Each entry describes what the plugin previews and provides installation instructions, typically via Homebrew (a package manager for macOS) or a manual download. Plugins in the list cover things like plain text files without extensions, Markdown files, JSON, archive contents, video files, source code with syntax highlighting, iOS provisioning profiles, WebP images, and more. Some are free and open source; others are paid apps from the Mac App Store.
The list also notes that on macOS Catalina and later, some plugins require removing a quarantine security attribute before they will work, and provides the commands to do that. This is purely a reference list, not a software package itself.
Where it fits
- Preview source code files with syntax highlighting by pressing spacebar in Finder.
- Quickly inspect JSON, YAML, and other structured data files without opening an editor.
- View Markdown and plain text file contents directly in Quick Look.
- Check video file metadata and thumbnails before opening them in a player.