PreviewText 1.0.6

QuickLook preview and icon thumbnailing app extensions for macOS Catalina and beyond.

PreviewText provides previews and thumbnails for textual files that have no file extension, or use non-standard extensions, including .toml, .conf, .config, .nfo, .1st, .srt and .sub.

PreviewText is available free of charge from the Mac App Store.

Installation and Usage

Just run the host app once to register the extensions — you can quit the app as soon as it has launched. We recommend logging out of your Mac and back in again at this point. Now you can preview textual documents using QuickLook (select an icon and hit Space), and Finder’s preview pane and Info panels.

You can disable and re-enable the Text Previewer and Text Thumbnailer extensions at any time in System Preferences > Extensions > Quick Look.

Adjusting the Preview

You can change some of the key elements of the preview by using the Preferences panel.

Changing these settings will affect previews immediately, but may not affect thumbnail until you open a folder that has not been previously opened in the current login session.

Source Code

This repository contains the primary source code for PreviewText. Certain graphical assets, code components and data files are not included. To build PreviewText from scratch, you will need to add these files yourself or remove them from your fork.

The files REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_FUNCTIONS and REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_CODES must be replaced with your own files. The former will contain your sendFeedback(_ feedback: String) -> URLSessionTask? function. The latter your Developer Team ID, used as the App Suite identifier prefix.

You will need to generate your own Assets.xcassets file containing the app icon, app_logo.png and theme screenshots.

You will need to create your own new directory containing your own new.html file.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome, but pull requestss can only be accepted when they target the develop branch. PRs targetting main will be rejected.

Contributions will only be accepted if they code they contain is licensed under the terms of the MIT Licence

Release Notes

• 1.0.6 3 September 2024
  • Support .conf and .config files.
  • Revert NSTextViews to TextKit 1 (previously bumped to 2 by Xcode).
  • Correct Preferences panel preview behaviour in Dark Mode.
  • Improve preference change handling.
  • Fix preview colour changes across modes and mode changes.
• 1.0.5 29 April 2024
  • Support .toml files.
  • Allow the user to set a minimum size below which thumbnails will not be rendered because they’ll be too small to be of value. Default: 48 pixels.
  • Revise Thumbnailer code with a view to reducing massive memory usage seen by some users, and as-yet-unexplained Thumbnailer crashes.
  • Fix the 'white flash' seen on loading the What's New sheet.
• 1.0.4 14 August 2023
  • Non-shipping release: repo/code reorganisation.
• 1.0.3 12 May 2023
  • Remove .asc — conflict with PreviewCode for Asciidoc files.
• 1.0.2 22 March 2023
  • Make previewed text selectable.
  • Support go.mod, go.sum and go.work files.
  • Support .in and .out files.
• 1.0.1 21 January 2023
  • Fix issue with line-spacing (thanks @aaronkollasch).
  • Correctly preview line-spacing changes.
• 1.0.0 23 December 2022
  • Initial public release.

Copyright and Credits

Primary app code and UI design © 2024, Tony Smith.