macOS Ventura: finder's file preview less powerful?

So you are right that it used to work in previous version of macOS, but it clearly does not work anymore in Ventura.

Then you need to install an app that can handle .Tex and provides a quick look rendering plugin (or whatever it is called). I found BBEdit does provide Quick Look with the needed information to display the markup. I believe I stated this on the first page of this post, and it is marked as the most correct answer.

You don’t seem to understand why it no longer works, and seem unwilling to accept the reason.

So, I don’t think the “Open with BBEdit” button means that BBEdit is actually the provider of the appropriate quicklook extension — the BBEdit developers have explicitly told me that they don’t provide one!

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve had BBEdit installed the whole time I was having the “TipsAppQuicklook” problem with *.tex files.

As mentioned above, the app at https://github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight seems to fix it for me by explicitly providing quicklook for many types of text source files (perhaps too many!)… Also, after installing it and then uninstalling it as a test, the “TipsAppQuicklook” message seems to go away for some — but not all! — file types, but still without actually showing the preview window.

Curiouser etc.

Ok, I believe that I have solved the problem slightly more generally.

Having noticed different behaviour after deleting the [syntax highlighter](https://github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight) app, I tried some more deletions. First, I deleted TextMate. Still no preview, but the button changed from "Open with TextMate" to "Open with TeXShop". So I deleted TeXShop. And then... it worked (i.e., unhighlighted full window preview with an "Open with Bbedit" button)!

But I still wanted TextMate, so I reinstalled it (and TeXShop, although I really don't use it) and... it still worked! It still had "Open with BBedit" but I was able to change that with the "Get Info" dialog. It's not perfect: no syntax highlighting, and css files still don't show a preview, but it's an adequate solution (though I may actually go back to the new syntax-highlight app).

Clearly there is some dependence of all of this on the order of installation of the applications and how they register their capabilities which can result in clashes. I wonder if it's documented anywhere and if there are less sledgehammery ways to change how it works....

etresoft wrote:

I'm going to fire up the High Sierra VM and see if I can get those old apps working. I just want to see if they ever displayed the QuickLook preview correctly. Based on what you've said, I strongly suspect that it never worked.

And the exercise was every bit as fun as I had imagined. First of all, I downloaded the version for "Sierra and above". Of course, it requires Mojave. No problem, I've got lots of VMs. I did get it working in Mojave.

And guess what? These tools never, ever provided a functional QuickLook display. One of them, the "BibTex" tool did provide syntax highlighting. But the other one just displayed the source. Or perhaps it was simply always broken. When I deleted both quicklook extensions from the apps, it still worked.

To summarize, this problem was always caused by buggy 3rd party apps. These apps have always been buggy. It's just that no one noticed until Apple changed the QuickLook architecture and one of those buggy apps triggered some other unexpected and unexplained behaviour.

The the poor LaTeX users have never had a functional QuickLook preview that displayed the rendered content. That's literally what QuickLook was designed to do. It should come as no surprise that someone who didn't understand the fundamental concept would develop a buggy implementation.

Latex is source code, compilation is not particularly fast, and in fact latex projects can have multiple files. I would not expect (nor want) quicklook to render them as a compiled document any more than I would want quicklook to render C source code as a compiled application. The old behaviour was exactly what I (and most or all other latex users) wanted, since I would be previewing them in advance of editing them.

I am nearly certain that the system successfully did source code highlighting using whatever apps I had on my system that were able to provide that quicklook service (probably TextMate, as I’ve said), but I am absolutely 100% certain that it did successfully render them as text. TextMate was not a “buggy implementation” of the old version of quicklook, but indeed it is not being as actively maintained now and its developers (now open-source) have not implemented this, unfortunately. Until three or so months ago, it worked fine.

Yes, there is certainly a bug somewhere in the current complicated chain of macOS, some applications, and their plists which are causing some kinds of source files to not correctly render as text in quicklook under some circumstances. This may or may not be due to TextMate or another third party app like TeXShop — perhaps not entirely, because the fact that it is sometimes attempting to resolve to Apple’s “Tips” app seems suspicious.

So, please, there is no need for what I can only interpret as an angry and snarky attitude to all of us calmly trying to explain our point — even if you disagree.

a.jaffe wrote:

Latex is source code, compilation is not particularly fast, and in fact latex projects can have multiple files. I would not expect (nor want) quicklook to render them as a compiled document any more than I would want quicklook to render C source code as a compiled application.

That's why QuickLook displays the binary code for image files and the raw data stream from PDF files. It's QuickSource, not QuickLook.

TextMate was not a “buggy implementation” of the old version of quicklook, but indeed it is not being as actively maintained now and its developers (now open-source) have not implemented this, unfortunately. Until three or so months ago, it worked fine.

Let's review ancient history of a few hours ago. You are the one who keeps mentioning TextMate. One of the few times you didn't was when you said, "So I deleted TeXShop". To this I responded, "Deleting buggy 3rd party apps often fixes these problems." TeXShop. Not TextMate. Two different apps. Different spelling and everything.

So, please, there is no need for what I can only interpret as an angry and snarky attitude to all of us calmly trying to explain our point — even if you disagree.

There is no disagreement because there are no opinions. I've definitively, objectively established the cause of this problem - ancient, incompatible, buggy, poorly made TeX software. And to top it all off, it never actually did anything. No one ever had a functional QuickLook. It was always just source - generated by the operating system. It never, ever worked at all. But the code that was never used was written so poorly that it corrupted the normal behaviour of the system.

What a waste!

I downloaded an example TeX file and it was set to be handled by BBEdit. It showed a preview, icon preview, and QuickLook of the markup text. It did not interpret the markup.

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

I'm snot sure what the problem is here but FWIW here's a text file I just created and what it looks like in Ventura as an icon and in Quickview:

Any chance of that?

You’d have to ask Apple.

I haven’t tried .md, but as noted, .tex files QuickLook fine on my Mac.

I'm snot sure what the problem is here but FWIW here's a text file

.tet (as in, TeX, the markup language), not .txt (as in, text).

D**n eyes! 🤭