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Comment by doomlaser | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of one of my favorite features from the Mac: Quick Look — press space to instantly bring up a big contextual preview window of the selected document in the Finder.

You can bring it to Windows with this useful open source tool: https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook

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It's easily forgotten now, but in the 95 and 98 eras Microsoft actually bundled a utility called Quick View [1] that added a quick preview to the context menu. It got lost in the XP transition and I have to wonder if they thought that the changes that came along with the IE-ified version of explorer.exe (image thumbnails, document previews in the sidebar) replicated enough of the functionality that it wasn't necessary anymore (they didn't).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_View

I use this all the time. While the preview window is open, you can even use keyboard arrows to move to other files (or just select them with mouse) and the preview gets updated.

You can also:

- Command-Delete to delete the current file

- Return, type a new name, and return, to rename the current file

In both cases the view will properly update.

Yes! Love this for Windows, there are plugins for it too, similar to the plugins for macOS. Like you, QuickLook is one of my favorite and most-used macOS features and I cannot be on a system without it.

Between this project and PowerToys, the Windows experience is a lot more enjoyable.

PowerToys Run especially (essentially Alfred or QuickSilver for Windows), is much faster and better than standard Win-S searches.

Keypirahna

https://keypirinha.com/

Fish or cocktail?

According to the web site's FAQ, cocktail. :)

I love Quick look on Mac OS! You can also use it within dock stacks- hover over an item in an expanded stack and press space.

I have remembet that when the preview window is active, if you double click the document it will open in relavent app. It seems to gone at some point. Any idea?

That's if you're using Finder's embedded preview on Columns mode. If you're using Spacebar to preview, there will be a button on the top right corner to open in the relevant app.

Actually I'm almost sure that was working with both options before. Weird. Thanks anyway!

I've noticed that in windows 11, the file explorer shows a document preview, at least for certain documents when selected.

Yes, there are plugins for the preview pane and some are built-in. That’s very nice, but I prefer having the ability to hit space to preview because of 15 years of muscle memory doing that with macOS.

Quick look is more than just a preview, it's really a read-only view of the document. You can read entire documents and PDFs, view HTML files rendered, pan through CSVs, etc

I love that you can preview videos in their icons. Where "preview" actually means "watch the entire thing from start to finish".

On Linux, I use Gnome Suchi.

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