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Quick View

English | 日本語

Choose View → Quick View (quick_view) and the other pane becomes a preview of the item under the cursor. Move the cursor and the preview follows. Run it again, or press Esc, to close it. Its key depends on your keymap preset — see Keymap Presets.

Item under the cursor	The preview shows
Text file	the start of the file (up to 256 KB), syntax-highlighted as in the text viewer
Picture	the picture, fitted to the pane
Other binary file	a hex dump of the first 512 bytes
Folder	how many files and folders it holds and their total size, counted while you watch

Above the content, a header line names the item, with its size and date.

Working with it

• The keyboard stays on the file list. Move, select, open folders, delete and so on as usual. The preview only watches, and follows the cursor into a folder you open too.
• Scroll the preview with the mouse wheel.
• The other pane is kept. Its folder, cursor and selection come back exactly as they were when quick view closes.
• Switching panes closes quick view (Tab). The preview is not a pane you can work in.
• Copying or moving to the other pane is refused while quick view is open. That pane’s folder is hidden behind the preview, so the files would land somewhere you can’t see. The same goes for comparing with the other pane and syncing the two panes’ folders. Close quick view first; the log says so.

Speed

The preview waits until the cursor stops for a moment, so moving quickly down a long listing doesn’t read every file it passes.

On a remote location (ssh://, s3://, inside an archive), only files up to 256 KB are read. Larger files show their size and date. Remote folders are not counted, because counting would walk the whole tree over the network.

In a terminal that can’t draw pictures, a picture shows only its details.

See also

• Text Viewer and Image Viewer: the full viewers (File → View File)
• File Details: size on disk and more (File → Details…)