Unleash the Full Potential of Your Mac’s Quick Look: Supercharge it with These Game-Changing Plugins!
As a Mac user, you likely know and love the Quick Look feature. With just a press of the spacebar, you can quickly preview any file on your Mac, without needing to open it in a separate app. This is a hugely convenient feature that can save you time and make your workflow more streamlined.
But did you know that you can enhance Quick Look even further with the help of some powerful plugins? These plugins can help you do things like view videos, images, and PDFs more easily, or even convert files to different formats without ever having to leave Quick Look. Let’s take a look at some of the best Quick Look plugins that can help you supercharge your workflow.
1. QLColorCode
If you often work with source code files, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to try and decipher lines of code in Quick Look. That’s where QLColorCode comes in. This plugin adds syntax highlighting to Quick Look previews of source code files, making them much easier to read and understand.
2. QLMarkdown
If you’re a writer or a blogger, chances are you work with Markdown files fairly often. QLMarkdown is a plugin that lets you view Markdown files in Quick Look, complete with rendered HTML. This can be a huge time-saver because it means you don’t have to keep switching between your Markdown editor and a web browser to check how your formatting looks.
3. qlImageSize
If you work with images a lot, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to have to open each image in an image editor just to check its dimensions. qlImageSize is a plugin that solves this problem by adding image dimensions to Quick Look previews of images. This can be incredibly handy if you’re trying to resize or crop images to a specific size.
4. QLVideo
If you often work with video files, you’ll know that Quick Look doesn’t always provide the greatest preview experience for them. The QLVideo plugin changes that by letting you preview videos directly in Quick Look. You can even play, pause, fast-forward, and rewind videos within Quick Look, without having to open them in a separate app.
5. QLStephen
If you work with text files that don’t have file extensions, you’ll know how annoying it is to have to manually open each one to see what’s inside. QLStephen is a plugin that solves this problem by allowing Quick Look to preview a wide range of text files that don’t have file extensions. This can be especially useful if you work in industries like web development, where file extensions are often stripped for security reasons.
6. QLConvert
If you often find yourself needing to convert files to different formats, you’ll love the QLConvert plugin. This plugin lets you convert files to different formats without ever having to leave Quick Look. Simply select the file you want to convert, hit the spacebar to open Quick Look, and then click the “Convert” button.
Conclusion
Quick Look is already an incredibly powerful feature of macOS, but with the help of these plugins, you can take it even further. Whether you work with source code, images, videos, or text files, there’s a Quick Look plugin out there that can help you work more efficiently and effectively. Give these plugins a try today and see how much they can supercharge your workflow!
Quick Look is one of the most convenient features of macOS as it is immediately accessible from any Finder window. Just tap the Spacebar, and you’ll immediately see a large preview of whatever files are currently selected. Quick Look can show you full-resolution images, video previews, text files, and more. But even with all that built-in power, there’s still more that it can do. You can expand Quick Look’s functionality by downloading and installing plugins from around the Web.
Finding Plugins for Quick Look
To expand Quick Look’s capabilities, you’ll first need to find some plugins you want to download. The QuickLook Plugins List is a great place to start, and it’s probably the single largest collection of Quick Look plugins online. You might notice that some of them are a little dated, but most still work with even the newest version of macOS Sierra.
You can also check out GitHub user sindresorhus’s list of developer-specific Quick Look plugins.
Installing Quick Look Plugins
Some Quick Look plugins use an installer to install themselves, but most don’t. If you want to install a Quick Look plugin that doesn’t have its own installer, follow these steps.
For this example we’ll be using the qlBitRate plugin which displays the bitrate of MP3 files in the Quick Look title bar.
Download the latest version of qlBitRate from the project’s GitHub release page.
Unzip the downloaded file by double-clicking on it. You’ll get a .qlgenerator file with a plugin-style icon.
Copy the unzipped plugin file into the “/Library/QuickLook” directory. (If you want this plugin to be accessible to only the current user, you can instead copy the plugin file to “~/Library/QuickLook.”)
Now, open Terminal which is found at “/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app,” and enter the following command:
This will immediately quit and restart the Finder app, so make sure you’re not moving or copying any files when you try this.
- If you use Quick Look on an MP3 file, you’ll notice the bitrate is now visible in the window’s title bar.
Other Plugins for Quick Look
There’s a surprisingly complete library of free plugins for Quick Look available online. Most of these plugins either add new file format compatibility to Quick Look or improve upon existing previews. For example, the QuickLookJSON plugin changes macOS’s hard-to-read JSON preview into color-coded and properly-formatted text. Some go-to options to expand Quick Look include the following.
qlImageSize
qlImageSize displays the file size and dimensions of an image in pixels in the Quick Look title bar.
Quicklook-csv
By default, Quick Look displays CSV files as unreadable plain text files. Quicklook-csv fixes that by tweaking previews for CSV files to show columns and rows.
QLVideo
QLVideo greatly expands the types of video files that Quick Look can handle. The .webm preview doesn’t seem to work on Sierra, but .avi, .mkv, and .flv support is great.
QLStephen
QLStephen adds preview ability for text files without extensions, like README and INSTALL.
QLMarkdown
QLMarkdown adds preview capability for Markdown files, which are displayed as styled text.
Conclusion
MacOS’s Quick Look tool is useful even in its default state, but it doesn’t work with every file type. You can install any of the above plugins, or one of the many other available plugins, to handle more file types and improve preview capability for a variety of file formats.
Alexander Fox is a tech and science writer based in Philadelphia, PA with one cat, three Macs and more USB cables than he could ever use.
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