QLStephen not working at all

Question

So, coming across what QLStephen could do, I brewed it at once in the hopes of having the Quick Look functionality for most of the "text-based" files, as it advertises. However, to my disappointment, nothing was affected. I found temporary relief to find that the exact issue had been discussed here, but the suggested troubleshooting didn't help. Here's what all I did:

1. Ran brew install qlstephen which installed QLStephen.qlgenerator in ~/Library/QuickLook. Quick Look didn't preview any more files than those for which it was already working without QLStephen. In particular, all of the hidden files in my user directory are still non-preveiwable. These include: .bash_history, .CFUserTextEncoding, .gitconfig, .lesshst, .profile, .python_history, .Rhistory, .viminfo, .Xauthority, .zprofile, .zsh_history, .zshrc, mbox

2. [cf. the troubleshooting post mentioned above] The UTI of each of the files listed above is public.data, and QLStephen is supposed to act on these, but nope!

3. [cf. Permissions (Quarantine) on the GitHub page for QLStephen] Ran sudo xattr -cr ~/Library/QuickLook/QLStephen.qlgenerator, qlmanage -r and qlmanage -r cache followed by relaunching Finder. Still nothing.

4. [cf. Trouble on the GitHub page for QLStephen] Ran qlmanage -m and couldn't find public.data, indicating that "a different application's qlgenerator file hasn't taken precedence". Now the next troubleshooting steps are not at all clear—they just mention to edit some files, but not what to edit.

5. Tried brew reinstall qlstephen ample times, but still, nothing budged.

System info: macOS Sequoia 15.1 on M2 with Xcode installed.

Answer 1

QLStephen seems to have been non-functional for quite some time, given the issues raised on its repo.

Indeed, the latest issue at the time of writing mentions its reliance on an API deprecated in Sequoia

You may find more support on the Repo than here, especially as there have been multiple issues raised there seemingly each time some major OS changes are made. But as no project releases have been made since Catalina, you may have to consider it defunct unless you're prepared to fork it yourself.

Further info and here from Howard Oakley.