Quicklook for markdown

10 Feb 2009 » permalink

Quicklook plugin

Update: My changes were merged into the original code.

As services such as DropBox become more mature, it makes again sense to store simple textual content (ie. notes) as files — instead of going for Everything Buckets. For simple text files DropBox provides an actually working synchronization, offline access to the data and a pretty good integration with the native platform (be it GNOME or OSX).

I usually store my notes and other simple text snippets as markdown-formatted plain-text files. The simple markdown format is exactly the amount of syntactic sugar I need to get along. Additionally, the markdown format is supported by all popular editors (gEdit, TextMate, vi…) and many web-writing platforms.

On OSX by default the markdown files (.markdown) have two limitations when compared to standard (.txt) files:

Installing an editor such as TextMate gives support for the .markdown extension but does not solve either of the above problems.

Phil Toland did a great work and created a markdown quicklook plugin. I took his code and improved a bit on it. In particular, my version does 3 things more:

To get going you need to install the compiled binary plugin in ~/Library/Quicklook/ (create if it doesn’t exist).

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