Add these plugins for an effective “look” to your Mac

The Quick Look feature in macOS is great for quickly previewing your files. Can be decorated with overlays. Here are a few.

Glance is one of the best features of your Mac. With it, you can select a file and press the spacebar to preview an image, view text in certain files, and view certain information, such as the file size. Many people use Quick Look every day to preview files without fully opening them. And you can install plugins to make Quick Look even more useful.

Viewing the contents of a compressed file

BetterZipQL is a great application that allows you to view the contents of certain compressed file formats (zip, rar and 7z) as easily as if they were regular files. Once the app is installed, go to settings and select the Look tab. Activate all options to take full advantage.

Check if files in a package are safe

Some applications, such as Zoom, are available as macOS installation packages (.pkg). A suspicious package is an application that allows you to quickly check the contents of a package without opening it. When you install an app, it automatically adds its features to the Look.

Press the spacebar after selecting a file. pkg file on your Mac and the app will tell you what’s inside, if the app is authenticated by Apple, and the developer information. The suspicious package can also give you a preview of disk image (.dmg) files, but not through the “Glance”plugin.

ebook preview

To get a quick preview of an eBook before you start reading, install the Spotlight plugin called epub-quicklook. The installation instructions on the GitHub page are easy to follow, but macOS may block the plugin on initialization. You can bypass this block by going to System Preferences > Privacy & Security and running the plugin manually. Once installed, hit the space bar with any epub file selected for a quick preview of the cover art and its intro.

Viewing the contents of a torrent file

By default, macOS does not allow you to view the contents of a. torrent file. You usually need to add the file to a torrent client like Transmission to see the full list of files through that app. The BitTorrent QuickLook Generator saves it all, so you can see everything just by hitting the space bar.

Download the application, install it, select the torrent file and press the space bar. You will then see a list of all files inside. Keep in mind that this is useful for checking for possible duplicates, not for securing the files themselves. Anyone can rename files in a torrent to hide malware.

Improved video preview

macOS is not very good at previewing video files like mkv. You can fix this by installing QLVideo. After that, launch the app once and click the Refresh button on the app.

Then select a video file without a preview (.mkv,. avi or. webm) and press the space bar. You will now see some snapshots extracted from the file so you can quickly evaluate the quality of the video. You will also see that these files now have the correct preview and no longer have the default video player app icon.