I recently started indexing a folder for a new project – writing a bunch of YAML schema. DevonThink keeps writing unknown file type messages in the log. Is there any way to make DevonThink understand that these are just plain old text files? I am not looking for syntax coloring or anything like that (BBedit and VCS do that for me), but when I select that file in DT it shows a bit BBEDIT icon :). I would just like to see the text.
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I’d guess that you see the icon because you have set BBedit as default app for YAML files. As to making DT recognize them as text files: You might want to try using a smart rule for that. I didn’t test it, though:
- Select names ending with “yaml” (the “suffix” selection does not work here because it is a canned list that doen’t contain YAML)
- Set the action to “convert to text”.
You could try that with a copy of a document and run the rule manually to see if it works.
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Won’t that create another document?
I don’t know whether it works for your records but you could try the hidden preference AdditionalPlainTextExtensions. Search for this or „hidden preference“ in DEVONthink‘s help.
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Brilliant idea – didnt know that that pref existed. But alas, it doesn’t do it. I set them up:
defaults write com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions -string .json.yaml.yml
defaults read com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions
.json.yaml.yml
And then restarted DT… But I still just get the big BBEDIT icon.
Thanks though.
You’d need to set a different system default application for those file types if you want the icon to change.
i dont want the icon to change – i want to see the text 
DEVONthink uses Apple’s QuickLook technology for such previews. You’d need to look for and install an appropriate QuickLook plugin on your Mac, if one exists.
Ah… OK… I had installed the appropriate Quicklook plugin for Mojave, but haven’t found one yet for BigSur. Need to keep looking. Thanks – that gives me a target to shoot for.
You’re welcome.
Got it working.
A pointer to the quick look plugin or so might be helpful for posteriority, I think.
It was a few steps. I was going to try to document it.
I started by downloading QLStephen.qlgenerator. The one I found was version 1.4.3 (more on this a bit farther down). I put this (after unzipping) into ~/Library/Quicklook. Nothing happened.
Two commands you need to know about:
xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/QuickLook
This command will unquarantine the extension if you get the Apple error message about unknown developer, etc.
qlmanage -r
This commands restarts Quicklook and re-reads all of the plugins.
But it still didn’t work. (I think this worked for under Mojave). Then I found a note somewhere that you need to edit the Info.plist (inside the package) to add the value public.yaml to the LSItemsContentTypes key. So it looks like:
LSItemContentTypes
public.data
public.yaml. (this line wasnt there until i put it there)
Now I did qlmanage -r and voila quicklook worked on my .yaml file and then I tried DevonThink and it displayed as a text file there also.
As noted above, I downloaded version 1.4.3 because it was the first one that I found. Later on I found 1.5.1 in Github and I figured that it would “just work”. It didn’t “just work” so I backed down to 1.4.3. I probably could have gotten working with some more reading and playing and it likely fixes some bugs, but I am where I need to be for now, so maybe another day.
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Thanks for the info!
Hi Christian @cgrunenberg, is there a way to edit YAML files in DEVONthink? I tried adding it to AdditionalPlainTextExtensions, but that doesn’t make it editable. It’s just plain text, so I think it shouldn’t be a problem.
You might have to reimport the files or rebuild the database.
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Wonderful. Works perfectly now. Thanks, Chris.