QuickLook
This project is currently under heavy development. Come back often to see what's new.
Background
Quick Look is among the few features I missed from Mac OS X. It enables very quick preview of file by pressing Space key while highlighting it, without opening its associated application. Then I decide to add this feature to Windows by myself, which results this “QuickLook” project.
You may ask, why you write this when there several alternatives available on the Internet (e.g. WinQuickLook and Seer)? The answer is that, they are all among those which no longer actively developed, lack of support of file types and plugins, or asking user for amounts of $$$.
Usage
General usage
- Download either installer or portable archive from GitHub Release page
- Run
QuickLook.exe - Select a file/folder on the Desktop / in a File Explorer window / in an Open- or Save-File dialog
- Press Spacebar
- Select another file/folder in the same manner
- When you're done, click on the
❎button, or press Spacebar again
Hotkeys
- Spacebar Show/Hide the preview window
- Esc Hide the preview window
- Enter Open/Execute current file
- Mouse️ ↑ ↓ ← → Preview another file
- Ctrl-Wheel Zoom in/out images
Integration
- You may set up a custom hot key that fires event
QuickLook.exe C:\path\to\your\file.txt. - For developer: Send a line (ends with
\r\n) of UTF-8 string which contains the file path to the named pipe named\\.\pipe\QuickLook.App.Pipe.
Features
Till now, QuickLook supports the preview of
- Images: e.g.
.png,.jpg,.bmp,.gif,.psdand Camera RAW formats - Compressed archives:
.zip,.rar,.tar.gz,.7zetc. - Pdf file
- All kinds of text files (determined by file content)
- Microsoft Word (
.doc,.docx), Excel (.xls,.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.ppt,.pptx) files (requires MS Office installation) - OpenDocument (
odt,.odsand.odp) files (requires MS Office installation) - Video files (
.mp4,.mkv,.m2tsetc.) - HTML files (
.htm,.html) - Markdown file (
.md) - Other files and folders will be shown in a information box
Development
The previewing ability can be extended by new plugins. Read the plugin interface, context object for more information. Out-of-box plugins contain more detailed implementation.
Note that any plugin must be under the QuickLook.Plugin namespace, has the filename similar to QuickLook.Plugin.YourPlugin.dll and placed under <Application>\Plugins\QuickLook.Plugin.YourPlugin\ subfolder.
Related projects
QuickLook is standing on shoulders of several open-source libraries, named
- AvalonEdit: the WPF-based text editor component used in SharpDevelop
- dcraw: decoding raw digital photos in Linux
- ExifLib: a fast Exif data extractor for .NET 2.0+
- FFmpeg: a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video
- FFmpegMediaElement: WPF MediaElement replacement based on FFmpeg
- Font-Awesome-WPF: WPF & UWP controls for the iconic font and CSS toolkit Font Awesome
- github-markdown-css: The minimal amount of CSS to replicate the GitHub Markdown style
- ImageMagick: convert, edit, or compose bitmap images
- Magick.NET: The .NET wrapper for the ImageMagick library
- markdown-it: markdown parser, done right. 100% CommonMark support, extensions, syntax plugins & high speed
- MuPdf: lightweight PDF, XPS, and E-book viewer
- PreviewHandlerHost: IPreviewHandler Revisited
- SharpCompress: a fully managed C# library to deal with many compression types and formats
- Sumatra PDF: a PDF, ePub, MOBI, CHM, XPS, DjVu, CBZ, CBR reader for Windows
- WpfWebBrowserWrapper: a better WPF-Browser-Control (IE-Wrapper)
- XamlAnimatedGif: a simple library to display animated GIF images in XAML apps
Licenses
Application icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com. Used under the Flaticon Basic License.
All source codes, except which are from other projects mentioned in “Related projects” section, are licensed under GPL-3.0.
If you want make any modification on these source codes while keeping new codes not protected by GPL-3.0, please contact me for a sublicense instead.