How to Add Mac OS X’s ‘Quick Look’ Feature to Ubuntu

Sometimes Nautilus’ icon thumbnails and meta-data just isn’t good enough. Sometimes you wantto take a closer look at a file, photo or folder to make sure it’s the one you want.

And that’s whereGNOME Sushi can help.

GNOME Sushi adds a macOS style ‘ Quick Look ‘ feature to GNOME’sfamous file manager. Just select afile and tap the spacebar to see a larger (and sometimes interactive) preview.

Instant previews of image, music and video files are possible thanks to the GStreamer framework. Sushi can alsosupports filepreviewsof most plain-text documents, including scripts with syntax highlighting, PDFs and HTML files.

It’s a quick and effective way to take quick peeks at PDFs, photos and other documents without having to open them fully.

Sadly Sushi doesn’t update the preview ifyou move off and select other files (which the macOS version does do).

It also lacks any additional ‘actions’. For example, it’d be great if, having Sushi’d the right selfie from the 342 I’ve taken, I could tap a button to open it in the default image viewer, or shunt it to GIMP, et al.

Although amodest feature (there are no bells or whistle) Sushi’s seamless preview prowess is such thatafter a few days use you’ll wonder how much you managed without!

GNOME Sushi is not installed by default on Ubuntu, but you can install it very quickly using the command line:

Alternatively, install it usingUbuntu Software:

Click to install GNOME Sushi