Shaun Haber

For all you Leopard users out there, here’s a handy trick to use Quick Look from the command line.

Leopard ships with a command called ‘qlmanage’. The -p option shows a preview of the file passed to the command. In the terminal, type the following:

qlmanage -p thefile

You can extend this by creating the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
qlmanage -p $1 >& /dev/null &

The >& /dev/null prevents output from displaying, and the & runs the process in the background so a new prompt displays on the terminal.

Download it here.

Save this script as an executable file and store it somewhere in your PATH. I recommend naming it something short like ‘ql’.

(Note: I stored mine in a home bin folder used for custom-made scripts).

You can close the Quick Look window with the mouse (the conventional way), or close it in the terminal by getting the pid from the ps command and using kill [pid].

Using the ql command in Terminal

Closing the Quick Look window using the kill command

This feature is really handy for me because I spend a lot time in the Terminal. Many times I encounter a file such as an image, pdf, word doc, etc. that I’d like to briefly preview.

Before I discovered this, I would resort to opening Finder and navigating to the same directory to preview the file. Being able to do this all from Terminal is a real time saver!

[UPDATE]
A better solution is to use “$@” (with quotes) instead of $1 in the script. This will allow multiple arguments and wrap quotes around each one to account for spaces or other odd characters in the filename. Additionally, providing multiple arguments creates a slideshow in Quicklook.


#!/bin/bash
qlmanage -p “$@” >& /dev/null &


I use NetNewsWire as my main RSS reader on the Mac. Until recently, I had a hard time keeping up on all my feeds. However, I recently employed 2 tricks to greatly improve my productivity for perusing my feeds and finding the gems.

Tip #1: Flatten the Feeds

For the longest time, I tried hard to keep my feeds categorized: Apple, Tech, Blogs, Flickr, etc. Ultimately, this required too much cognitive overhead.

Where should I place a new feed? Does it need a new category? Where was that other feed I want to read? Under Tech? Blogs? etc…

The solution: Flatten the feeds!

Having one long list of feeds sorted alphabetically has been a huge help. Now I don’t have to think twice when I add a new feed, and I can easily scroll up or down to find a particular feed I want to read.

Tip #2: Create a hot key on the mouse for “Mark All As Read”

NetNewsWire has the Cmd-K hotkey for the “Mark All As Read” feature. This is useful for quickly committing RSS suicide. Additionally, it prevents you from having to increment through each story one-by-one to mark them as read.

I took this one step further by mapping my middle click mouse button to Cmd-K for the NewNewsWire app. I did this using the SteerMouse driver for the Logitech VX Revolution mouse.

Now I never need to lift my hand off the mouse. I can quickly scan through and mark off all my feeds at an olympic gold-medal pace.

Bonus Tip

I use the Combined View layout in my feed reader. The left column shows all the feeds, the right columns shows all the stories and the body text. This is in contrast to the Traditional and Widescreen Views, which require an extra click on the story headline to read the actual text. Not really a tip, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

[tags]NetNewsWire, rss, feed reader[/tags]