Read Plists In Quick Look

Press Space on a property list and read it, binary ones included

Works without the Space helper
Free and open source
macOS 13+

Info.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"><plist version="1.0"><dict>  <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>  <string>en</string>  <key>CFBundleDisplayName</key>  <string>Orbit</string>  <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>  <array>    <dict>      <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>      <string>Orbit Queue</string>      <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>      <string>Editor</string>      <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>

The sample app’s Info.plist, shown as highlighted XML: drawn in HTML, not a screenshot.

Many plists, like those in ~/Library/Preferences, are binary, and Quick Look often shows them as an icon. spacebar shows every plist as indented, highlighted XML, converting binary ones for the preview only, read-only. In an XML plist, Raw and a click fix a typo.

Install It

Download for Mac

Or paste this in Terminal

$ curl -fsSL https://spacebar.patebryant.com/install.sh | sh

The script downloads the latest notarized release from GitHub, checks its SHA-256 and installs to ~/Applications, no sudo. Read the script.

Press Space On A Plist

Info.plistIn an app: Show Package Contents › Contents.
Spacespacebar shows it as XML.
↑ ↓The next file in the sidebar.

Without spacebar

Command	Prints
`plutil -p file.plist`	The plist
`plutil -convert xml1 -o - file.plist`	It as XML, without changing it

More: JSON, YAML and TOML, file types, the Space helper, Quick Look replacement, compare.