Leopard Quicklook Plugins For More File Formats

new-quicklook

[Mac only] Mac OS X Leopard comes with a Quicklook tool. Basically, if you hit ’space-bar’ once, it gives you a quick look at the content (whether it’s a text or image) before you decide to launch it. It’s really something cool and thoughtful, but not great enough. The limitation – not all file formats are supported, and you can’t do quicklook on a folder.

Here’s some hacks/plugins I stumbled across recently, by installing it, you can quicklook into folders, zip files and few other file formats that greatly enrich the experience of file browsing.

Quicklook on Folders

mac quicklook

The image above describe best what I’m trying to explain here. On the left is what you get on a normal Quicklook, as for the one of the right, it gives you a more informative and in depth look into the files within a folder.

Like it? Click here to download the necessary files, we’ll proceed to installation steps soon.

Quicklook on other file formats

You can also make quicklook works on these following file formats:

.ZIP – download
.FLV – download
.EPS – download
.XML – download
.AI (Adobe Illustrator) – download
Textmate – download

Installation

Upon download, place the .qlgenerator file inside /Library/QuickLook/ and relaunch Finder. Quicklook should now give you a brand new perspective of your files.

If you noticed that the new quicklook did not work after a Finder relaunch, try relaunching the Finder again.

Comments

Felix May 15th, 2008

one of the best post hongkiat! thx
Reply
hongkiat May 15th, 2008

@Felix Thanks, I really like this Quicklook mode.
Reply
Wendy May 16th, 2008

Also got other common format, such as package file :)
QuickLookPlugins.com almost lists all useful QuickLook plugins (for free? Maybe..).
Reply
george May 16th, 2008

This is cool man… thanks for sharing :)
Reply
Rodrigo Henrik May 24th, 2008

Very very good! Thanks
Reply
Ozmo September 26th, 2008

It has always confounded me that quicklook and the icon image of AI and EPS files were always application icons, not artwork previews. It especially sucked when in a folder looking at artwork files in column view mode. When file names are similar and I forget which was which, it seemed to be my only hope to open them all in Illustrator.

Thanks to your awesome advice, not only can I look to the preview in column view, but hit the spacebar and QuickLook tells me exactly whats up!

Thanks a million!
Reply
Rashid Ayoth February 2nd, 2009

Coooooool, Thanks Man
Reply
Nik September 28th, 2009

I tried this in Snow Leopard but was unable to get it to work?!?!

:)
Reply