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Search Paths for QuickLook plugins

May 27th, 2008 Comments off

You can debug your QuickLook plugin easily with the help of qlmanage. But sometimes, you don’t want to dump your plugin in /Library/QuickLook/ every time you build because you run as a regular (non-admin) user.

QuickLook has a search path feature. You can set the search order, and in my case I use my two build folders (Debug and Release) before the main /Library/QuickLook/ folder. It is a global, per-user property (hence the -g), and as far as I know, the array can contain as many values as you want

defaults write -g QLGeneratorSearchPath -array "/Volumes/DevSource/xcodebuild/Debug" \
                                               "/Volumes/DevSource/xcodebuild/Release/" \
                                               "/Library/QuickLook/"

It’s probably a good idea to leave /Library/QuickLook/ in there as the last element of the array.

If you want to delete the search path, simply type:

defaults delete -g QLGeneratorSearchPath

This does not seem to be documented, but it works for me; as usual, YMMV…

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