The best features are sometimes right under your nose. That’s the case with Quick Look, a Finder feature that can vastly speed up your Mac workflow.

Hit Spacebar for Quick Look

Quick Look is a feature that’s built into Finder that lets you preview and even interact with files without having to open them. It works with most common file types like PDF, JPG, and MP4. Just find a file, highlight it by clicking (or use the arrow keys), and hit the Spacebar. You can also use the right-click context menu, but that’s not as quick.

What happens next depends on the file you have selected. In the case of a PDF document or image, Quick Look will open the document quickly so that you can read or view it:

At the top of the page, you will even find a “Markup” pen icon that you can click to add text, arrows, scribbles, a signature, or crop your file. Opening a document like this in Quick Look even allows you to quickly mark it up on an iPhone or iPad.

In the case of a TXT file or a Pages document, Quick Look will display the contents of the file as if you’ve opened it in TextEdit or the Pages application:

For media like MP3 audio files or MP4 videos, Quick Look will play the file complete with playback controls and a bar you can use to seek backward and forward:

While you’re busy previewing, you can use the arrow keys to select different files. For best results, switch to List view in Finder then use the up and down arrow keys to move through your various files.

For any files that Quick Look cannot preview, you will see a brief summary and the app icon. This includes folders, application files, and more. You’ll get a brief overview of the item’s size, current version where applicable, and when it was last modified:

But Quick Look’s utility doesn’t end there.

Preview More Files With Quick Look Plugins

Apple provides decent support for basic file types out of the box, but you can do even more with Quick Look plugins. You can find these listed under Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions via the “Quick Look” section at the bottom of the page.

Many of these are installed alongside other apps. For example, markdown editor Ulysses allows for previewing of the markdown format (MD) with the correct formatting.

Other projects are distributed specifically as QuickLook plugins, like QLMarkdown which renders markdown files as HTML in a Quick Look window.

GitHub user Sindre Sorhus has thrown together a useful list of Quick Look plugins for developers complete with a Homebrew command for installing them all at once.

The package includes plugins that highlight code syntax (QLColorCode), an archive preview plugin (that’s also included with the BetterZip app), an image preview tweak that displays image size and resolution at the top of the window (qlImageSize), and an installer package previewer that peeks inside PKG files (Suspicious Package).

On top of this, there are many other Quick Look plugins available including more powerful syntax highlighting in the premium app Peek, and comic book (CBR/CBZ) Quick Look plugin Simple Comic.

You can toggle these plugins on and off under the Login Items & Extensions menu. Remember that you’ll need to treat them like regular apps and grant permission to locations for them to work properly (you can review your preferences under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Files & Folders).

Quick Look Is a Game Changer

Generally speaking, Quick Look is faster than launching the application associated with the file. For example, you might have a hefty PDF editor associated with the PDF file type, but sometimes you only need to quickly read through a PDF without making any changes.

Relying on Quick Look lets you preview quickly while still retaining file associations that suit your workflow. This feature is one of many Finder features you should be using.