Mac Quick Look tips

Some cool tips for mac I learned today. Mac has a cool quick look utility which is used for quickly looking at any file. This saves the time to open an application. For example, to quickly look at pdf file, I could go over the file in the Finder and press 'Space', and the file shows in a very fast viewer.

What makes it more interesting is that there is a command line utility 'qlmanage' which can be used for viewing files from command line in Terminal. This is very useful when modifying pdf files from command line and then viewing them. Interestingly, writers of Quick Look feature wrote the qlmanage utility to debug their program.

I use a small alias to open this program quickly.

alias ql='qlmanage -p "$@" >& /dev/null'

See this link for more information.