How do I get the Mac OS X 'quick look' feature to be more programmer-friendly?

Question

There are numerous text files that are always included in common downloads such as rails plugins: LICENSE, ChangeLog, Rakefile, etc.

I know these files are plain-text, but Mac OS X refuses to acknowledge this automatically. If I hit the spacebar in Finder to activate "quick look", the icon becomes huge but the contents of the file are not shown, presumably because they have no file extension.

How do I stop this madness so I can quickly look at READMEs just by hitting the spacebar?

I've already got a ton of text editors installed on my mac: this question is purely about efficiency and making simple files accessible as quickly as possible.

Answer 1

You will have to install (or possibly develop from scratch) a suitable quick look plugin.
You can find tons of them on sites such as:

• www.quicklookplugins.com
• www.qlplugins.com

An excellent starting point is to get a syntax coloring plugin!

Answer 2

I wonder how long it will take before people are happy to answer StackOverflow questions without calling the questioner's priorities into question.

Thanks Agos for the pointer to the syntax coloring plugins. After much surfing I found the exact QuickLook enhancement I was looking for:

http://whomwah.github.com/qlstephen/

Answer 3

Try this:

http://code.google.com/p/qlcolorcode/

Does syntax highlighting for a lot of languages, and if it's a language it doesn't understand, it just displays. Seems to work for me.

Answer 4

Even better than double-clicking is hitting 'enter.' Same result with one button.