macOS Ventura QuickLook for Stata do-files and ado-files

[William Lisowski]

Can any other macOS users confirm this change between macOS Monterey 12.6.2 and Ventura 13.1?

macOS provides a QuickLook feature that allows you to "see" the contents of a file without opening any app.

The first screenshot below is an example from my Monterey iMac (Intel processor) where I selected ac.ado in the Stata Base installation directory and hit the space bar, which brought up the window displaying the ado file (with an option to open it in TextEdit, the text editing utility included with macOS.

The second screenshot duplicates this example on my Ventura MacBook Air (M2 processor), but with unhelpful results and an incomprehensible error message. When this system was running Monterey the results were the same as on the iMac, so if it's a processor architecture feature, it's an interaction with Ventura.

If someone running Ventura can confirm this behavior on their system, I'll pass it along to Stata Technical Services.

[Jack Reilly]

I came here looking to find an answer to the same question. I'm on Ventura on an Intel iMac and do not get quick look previews either.

[William Lisowski]

Thank you - I'll ask Stata Technical Services if they can look into this. I suspect the problem lies in Ventura, either directly - a bug - or indirectly - something Stata was supposed to do to overcome the latest security changes or some other "enhancement" added in Ventura. That error dialog box from Ventura is clearly not aimed at the end user.

[Chinh Nguyen (StataCorp)]

We were able to reproduce this behavior. After a little bit of research, we couldn't find any information on what's changed in Ventura or what we need to do to make Stata's text file types display in Quicklook as plain text. Our guess is some of the properties we used that noted Stata's text file types conform to plain text files must have been deprecated in Ventura. We peeked inside some of Apple's latest software and followed their logic and that seems to have solved the Quicklook problem. This will be corrected in a future update (not the next update because it's coming out very soon).

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Thanks for raising this, William! This has been bugging me for a while, and I'm hoping the update that fixes it comes out soon!

[Haoran Liu]

Thank you! If you can add syntax highlight, that would be even better!

[William Lisowski]

The problem described in post #1 of this topic has be resolved in the 8 March 2023 update. Once the update is installed and Stata restarts, QuickLook now correctly displays do and ado files.