How to get Mac OSX Finder to preview programming text files that don't have .txt or .text extension?

Question

Programming obviously involves lots of text file usage. You often want to see what you did somewhere else in some other program, without loading up that whole program into your current IDE of choice.

If I copy a text file from say fred.cpp to fred.cpp.text, I can view the contents of the file from the Finder's preview. But I don't want to have copy or rename all my development files.

In a 2003 (!) post on MacOSHints, there is an instruction to do this

find . -name *.xml -exec SetFile -t TEXT {} ;

(in that case, for *.xml files), but this didn't work for me due to issues with the exec command. But in any case, surely there's a better way to do it from the GUI?

Either way though: a command-line or a GUI solution would be great, thanks!

Answer 1

2 years late but you can use

https://github.com/anthonygelibert/QLColorCode

install via brew cask

brew cask install qlcolorcode

or

brew install --cask qlcolorcode

(if you have a newer brew.)

for more nice usages of the quicklook, check this repo

https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins

Answer 2

There is the Textmate QuickLook plugin which only works with Textmate running.

Pro: Syntax Highlighting
Contra: Only with (non-free) Textmate running

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Alternatively: QLStephen

QLStephen is an Apple OSX QuickLook plugin that lets you view plain text files without a file extension.

But it works for all plain text files (even with extension).

Pro: Stable and free
Contra: No syntax highlighting