Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature.
Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.
The ability to extend QuickLook to support more types is huge too. If it can be rendered to a static image or HTML page it can have a QuickLook plugin written for it.
QuickLook is great. And the plugins are fantastic. I remember when I used to have a Mac there was a QL a plug-in that allowed you to peek into and browse Zip/Rar/DMG files.
That was so useful at a time where my workflow included multiple zip files containing assignments etc. Being able to simply hit spacebar to look into them, instead of decompressing and creating a new folder was incredible.
And if I’m not mistaken, the same plugin also allowed spotlight to then search the contents of the zip files.
Used it for a while, but it really annoys with random “let’s get updates in chinese” popup from time to time. This is that last mile that non-macs always get wrong, gosh.
Edit: to add some value to the rant, there is also MiniBin, which sits in a tray area and allows you to open/purge your recycle bin without reaching a desktop icon.
Preview works better than anything I’ve found for adding or deleting pages to a PDF, and using the camera to input your signature is such a nice feature.
I wish preview had the option to disable editing, I find its ability to make small changes a misfeature. I use it to read big spec documents, and it wants to change them all the time -- I think accidentally clicking on tables is the usual trigger. I resorted to making all my pdf files read-only, but Preview is the only pdf viewer that's ever forced me to do that...
To this day I have still never found any application on any device that is as simple and easy to add an arrow and some red text to an image for highlighting something as it is with preview. It is just unbelievable how janky and bad every single other application is at doing this simple task. Not even on phones is there anything easy.
Ahh interesting point. Somebody needs to make their next 20% project a gmail labs extension that gives a simple annotate option to images in mail. It would probably be a sleeper hit that gets more use than 90% of other gmail features.
> Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).
Editing PDFs and sticking your signature on documents is trivial with Preview.app. Save-as-PDF is broken (edits don't show up reliably), but you can easily just print to PDF to work around that bug.
I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great if either worked, but I haven't looked into it.
(FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes are on my desk too. PDF-related tasks are the only other reason why I turn to my Mac.)
How are those for editing PDFs? I haven't tried those specific tools, but in the past when I tried it was surprisingly difficult to figure out how to do things like merge 2 PDFs or rearrange the pages on non-Macs
Hmm, I installed a quick look equivalent on my desktop because I saw that mentioned as being so useful a lot, but I keep forgetting I have it. In what situations would you use it?
If you had the real Preview on MacOS, you’d be using it all the time without even thinking, like 100% of MacOS users. Because it’s fast, it opens everything faster than you can think, and it just works well. The effort required to launch it is zero, or even negative. It’s just part of the OS.
But since you have a « sort of » copy cat which does not work as well or as fast, is not as well integrated, does not support as many files or any fatal flaw like that, you just don’t use it.
So yes, Preview is underrated and really hard to replicate.
I wasn't talking about Preview, I was talking about quick look, i.e. when I browse files in my file browser, I can hit space and immediately look at that file in a pared-down interface. But I'm not browsing my files that often, and when I do, the only time I seem to be interested in what it looks like is when I'm looking for an image, in which case the thumbnails that I can see without interaction suffice.
So I'm probably missing something. Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise? And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing? And what kind of files?
Note that I'm not out to prove any point, I just want to understand what I'm missing :)
> Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise?
In my case, yes. It’s the only way I ever look at images, and I often use it to have a quick look at scripts or text/data files (try it on a CSV and it’ll show as a table!). It’s also convenient for design files, whose apps are incredibly slow to launch. With Alfred[1] you can even preview URLs directly.
Finally, QuickLook shines when you have file formats for which you don’t have an editor (e.g. you may need to view a Photoshop or Word document once in a while). It allows you to view them faster than in the editing application, for free, without having to install or configure anything.
Unlike the swath of people who are singing praises to Preview, I rarely touch it and mostly resort to QuickLook, even for PDFs.
> And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing?
It works (at least) to edit images like Preview (annotate, rotate, crop).
Thanks, I suppose I should make an effort to think of it when I look at local images or PDFs (which I don't do that often) - although edit doesn't seem to be supported by my version of it, unfortunately. CSVs or files without an editor I don't think I ever touch :)
It's faster, and less jarring when it opens due to animating FROM the file). It also works in Open / Save dialogue windows in any app which the equivalent does not.
That little "wait is this the file I want to open / overwrite?" When saving a file, it adds to an overall feeling of polish.
Like a tasty meal, it's all in the details and how they add up
quick look spreadsheets when you don't want to wait half a minute for excel to load. Quick look pdfs with nondescript names that you've downloaded to check paper titles/authors, quick look ppts youve been emailed (from within the email app) to see if they're worth reading in depth.
Not sure how GNOME's preview feature is written, but macOS QuickLook plugins are written in C, C++, or Objective-C and the plugins included with the OS leverage OpenCL (or maybe Metal now) to accelerate rendering of previews, which is part of why it's so fast.
Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.