Markdown Preview (quicklook) is nice, but failed in Catalina

The static CMS Jekyll uses markdown for content creation. Tidbits made me aware of a quicklook plugin for markdown. I downloaded it using the following code (in the terminal):

      brew update
      brew upgrade # not strictly necessary
      brew cask install qlmarkdown

That worked beautifully, now just a spacebar press renders the file for a quick look (sic). The joys of code!

However, in Catalina (MacOS 15) this runs into issues related to strict file access etc. After research and many trials, I found the following to work, based on a suggestion by “raadopt” on github (thanks!):

  1. The easiest way (didn’t work on all my machines)
    • open System Preferences>Security & Privacy>General, move the window aside to be visible
    • in the Finder do a quicklook on any *.md file. It will not work, rather an alert box will pop up, Ok it.
    • in the window Preferences>… now there should be a new message at the bottom, alerting you that an attempt to open the quicklook plugin has been made. If so, ok it.
    • that might be all you need to do… :)
  2. If it still does not work
    • in the Terminal, tyle qlmanage -r to reset the quicklook caches
    • log out, back in.
    • quicklook of markdown working now?
  3. If it still does not work…
    • disable Gatekeeper in the Terminal: sudo spctl --master-disable
    • repeat steps (1.) above.
    • re-enable Gatekeeper in the Terminal: sudo spctl --master-enable
    • possibly again logging out/in

Wow, so much work (possibly) for what, after all, is only cosmetic :). And, what’s more, all this will probably rendered moot after an update of qlmarkdown has appeared (currently 1.3.6).