Tip: Enhance QuickLook with Plugins

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite new features that was introduced with Leopard is QuickLook. This oft-forgotten feature allows you to preview files without ever having to open up an application, and it’s only a space bar click away.

Now, a team in Japan has released what appears to be the first external plug-ins for QuickLook, and they really add some awesome functionality to this already useful new tool. So in this article I will take you through the installation of a nifty Quicklook enhancement, that I really found helpful.

User XDD from .Mac has uploaded the Folder.qlgenerator QuickLook plug-in to his .Mac homepage as well as Zip.qlgenerator. To install, simply download this folder and uncompress it. With the folder uncompressed, you should see a couple of files inside, including a Readme, and the actual Folder.qlgenerator file.

Head over to your root ~/Library (the one when you click on your HDD, not the one in your home folder) and then find the folder entitled QuickLook. Now, simply drop the Folder.qlgenerator and Zip.qlgenerator into that folder.

Try and QuickLook a folder and you should see a new screen that shows the contents of that folder and not just the one large icon that QuickLook displays by default. If it doesn’t happen right away, either give it a minute, or try opening a Terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities) and typing killall Finder. This relaunches the Finder application, and should restart QuickLook properly.

Once you have it working, you should see that there’s a significant amount of new info that is now available to be viewed through the standard QuickLook window.

And another shot.

I found Zip.qlgenerator is incredibly useful to see what is actually contained in a Zip file without having to uncompress it. You can just invoke QuickLook with a .zip file selected and it will show you a list of the files that are within it.

Keep in mind that this is still BETA software, so there are definitely some bugs, but personally this seems to be working fine. One thing that I’d definitely like to see implemented is better scrolling to see all of the folders (or other contents) of a folder, as well as the ability to click on something in the folder being QuickLooked and have the option to launch the app. Also, it would be really cool if QuickLook on external drives could be enabled somehow?

So yeah this is a bit of a hack and it’s really done at your own risk, but if you have any problems, it shouldn’t be a big deal to just trash the Folder.qlgenerator file and go back to the way it was.

Let’s hope that this is just the beginning for home brew QuickLook plug-ins and that there are many more to come!