Add These Plugins to “Quick View” on Your Mac
Quick Look is one of the best features of your Mac. With it, you can highlight any file and press the space bar to view image previews, view text inside certain files, and check other information such as file size. Many of us use this feature every day to preview files without having to open them first – and you can install plugins to make Quick Look even more useful.
Viewing the contents of compressed files
BetterZipQL is a great application that allows you to view the contents of compressed files of various formats (zip, rar and 7z) as easily as if they were regular files. After installing the application, go to its settings page and select the “Quick View” tab. Enable all options here to get the most out of the app.
Check if it is safe to install package files.
Some applications, such as Zoom, are available as macOS installation package (.pkg) files. A suspicious package is an application that allows you to quickly check the contents of a package file without opening it. When you install an app, it automatically adds its features to Quick Look.
Hit the space bar after selecting any .pkg file on your Mac and the app will tell you what’s inside, whether the app has been notarized by Apple, and some information about the developer. The suspicious package also allows you to look inside disk image (.dmg) files, but not through the Quick Look plugin.
ebook preview
To quickly preview an eBook before reading it, install the Spotlight plugin called epub-quicklook . The installation instructions on its GitHub page are easy to follow, but macOS may initially block the plug-in. You can bypass these restrictions by going to System Preferences > Privacy & Security and running the plug-in manually. Once installed, press the space bar on any epub file on your Mac to view its cover and book introduction.
See what’s inside a torrent file
By default, macOS does not allow you to view the contents of a .torrent file. Usually you add a file to a torrent client like Transmission and view the full list of files using that application. BitTorrent QuickLook Generator will help you to skip this step, so you can press one key to open all contents of any torrent file.
Download the app, install it, select the torrent file and press the space bar. Now you will see the full list of files it contains. Remember that this is only useful for checking for duplicates, not for checking file security. Anyone can easily rename files inside a torrent to hide malware, so be sure to only download from trusted sources.
Improved video thumbnails
macOS can’t handle thumbnails for video file formats like mkv. You can fix this by installing QLVideo . Once you’ve done that, launch the app once and hit the Refresh button on the app.
Then select any video files that don’t have a thumbnail (such as mkv, avi or webm files) and press the space bar. You will now see several screenshots from the video file so you can immediately evaluate the quality of the video. You’ll also notice that these files now have useful thumbnails instead of the app icon for their default video player.