If you’ve ever pressed Spacebar in Finder and gotten the wrong Quick Look preview — plain text instead of Markdown, someone else’s renderer, or a blank stare from macOS — you already know the pain. PluginKit registrations are fiddly, conflicting extensions are common, and the fix usually involves a scavenger hunt through Terminal.
extensions, macos, markdown, marked, markedql, quick look, troubleshooting, utilities
Marked QL, my new Markdown Quick Look previewer, has met a warm reception, and I wanted to update everyone on a couple of things.
apex, markdown, marked, markedql
I gave a presentation at Macstock X that I thought people might be interested in. It was about Markdown publishing, and ostensibly about Marked, although I didn’t get to as much about Marked as I had intended. It still went pretty well.
macstock, markdown, ssh
I’ve been working on something small but useful, and it’s out now: Marked QL, a Quick Look extension that renders Markdown previews right in Finder. Select a file, hit Spacebar, and you get a real preview — not plain text, not a sad monospace dump, but actual formatted output with math, diagrams, syntax highlighting, the works.
apex, finder, macos, markdown, marked, markedql, qlmanage, quicklook, terminal
If you use NA, you’re going to love this: the Rust rewrite is noticeably faster than the original Ruby gem — especially in prompt hooks, where a quick into a project shouldn’t mean waiting on a script before you get your shell back. Same commands, same TaskPaper files, less lag.
cli, na, plugins, productivity, prompt, ruby, rust, scripting, shell, taskpaper, tools
Apex now has a option aimed at Pandoc/Quarto-style markdown for HTML output. This is not a Quarto replacement — you are not getting cell execution, project rendering, or PDF output from Apex alone. What you do get is a sensible HTML path for -style documents without running the full Quarto toolchain.
apex, html, markdown
Keeping help documentation screenshots up to date is tedious. Every time the UI changes, you end up manually opening windows, hiding distractions, capturing images, cropping them, generating @2x versions, and dropping files into the right folders. I got tired of that workflow for Marked , so I built an AppleScript that does most of it for me.
applescript, automation, automator, documentation, keyboard, macos, marked, scripting, tools
Apex 1.1.0 adds support for Pandoc-style grid tables — those ASCII-art tables built with , , , and instead of the usual pipe-table separators. If you have ever copied a grid table out of a Pandoc doc or academic paper and wished your Markdown processor would just deal with it, this one is for you.
apex, html, markdown, pandoc, tables
Thanks to Anecnote for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! It’s a really cool app for capturing and organizing memories, complete with context. I’ll let the developer explain.
sponsor
Thanks to everyone for bearing with me while I get launch bugs worked out of Marked. As a thank you to my readers, beta testers, and supporters, I wanted to offer a few free lifetime licenses for Marked 3.
giveaway, macos, marked, ssh
Despite my frequent warnings, a lot of nvALT (and Notational Velocity) users keep their notes in a database instead of individual files. And people are finding themselves unable to launch nvALT, meaning that database with all their notes is inaccessible. So I made a tool to rescue it.
export, formatting, macos, markdown, notes, nvalt, ssh, support, tools
