PreviewApps updated

All three of my PreviewApps — PreviewMarkdown, PreviewCode and PreviewYaml — got big updates this week. Headline features: significantly improved font, style and colour selection, across-the-range stability improvements, and faster PreviewCode theme preview presentation.

Each app allows you to pick a different font to display Markdown, YAML and source code file previews. The last two previously offered a limited selection of monospace fonts — now you can choose any monospace font that’s installed on your Mac. Additionally, the styles available for each font — regular, italic, bold, condensed, heavy and so on — can be selected separately:

Select any monospace font installed on your Mac…
…and select from among a font’s available styles

PreviewMarkdown uses monospace fonts for code blocks and proportionally spaced fonts for all other text. Again, you can now pick from any font of those types installed on your computer, and apply any of the available styles.

PreviewMarkdown and PreviewYaml use colour to highlight different parts of the presented file content: YAML keys, for instance, and code blocks in Markdown. Earlier versions provided a set of pre-defined colours, but some users wanted to apply different colours, so the new releases provide colour selection through the standard macOS colour picker:

Choose text colours with the macOS picker

Additionally — because it was requested — you can now pick a separate colour for headings to help them stand out even more.

These two PreviewApps were designed to provide simple, straightforward previews, so the range of customisation is intentionally limited. macOS’ QuickLook facility is meant for glances as files rather than content consumption, after all. So there’s less customisation on offer than a reader app might provide. That said, there is demand for deeper preview customisation, the feedback I’ve had via the apps themselves and the Mac App Store, so that’s on my list to add to a future release.

Speaking of feedback, please do keep your suggestions and bug reports coming in. Go something to post? Use the Send Feedback button in the apps’ main window.

Incidentally, for those of you asking about images in previews, that’s in the pipeline. Watch this space.

All three PreviewApps are available from the Mac App Store: