By far, the feature I most sorely miss in Linux compared to macOS is Quick Look. Press the space bar, see file contents. Use the arrow keys, view different files. Simple, quick, and WAY faster than opening an entire app every single time I want to check the contents of a file. I also miss the column view in conjunction with arrow keys (I’m VERY keyboard-centric, I liked being able to navigate everything with only a keyboard), but that’s less important, and probably has an easy analogue.

Most of the discussions about this that I found are older than I am (hyperbole), and I found a bunch of dead projects last updated years ago. I also found that GNOME apparently has a feature like Quick Look, but that would involve using GNOME.

I’m running Debian 12 with Plasma 5 (Does Plasma 6 have anything?) Is there any way to restore this functionality? I intend for this to be more of a master thread that anyone can visit to get help on the matter, as I’m sure I’m not the only Linux user who loves Quick Look.

Any suggestions or just talk is very appreciated.

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    11 months ago

    I adopted ranger as my file manager and there is a way to enable preview that works for text files, PDFs, and images (plugin). It’s not Quick Look, but you might not hate it.

    I like it primarily for reasons of using the keyboard to navigate, search, copy, move, delete, and open files. It helped me miss Alfred less.

    Someone else has mentioned nnn, which has similar aims.