You’re searching for some content on your desktop and opening pages file after pages file and pdf after pdf in QuickLook. Finally you find that one juicy morsel. It’s a short script you just need to copy into your clipboard. But you can’t. The gods of technology are aligned against you, to make you hit command-O and then after waiting for the entire 3 seconds it takes Preview to open, you have to search within the document for that information. Holy crap, you just lost at least 5 to 8 seconds of your day. I guess now you have to cancel vacation or let your spouse know you’ll be home late late.
But you don’t have to miss the train. I have a step in my imaging workflow that you’re going to love. One of those little gems I put in my default user and had almost started thinking was the default until I realized it was part of my imaging workflow during ML upgrades. Gain back at least 10 seconds a day with this handy little option: enable text selection in QuickLook. Basically, if you click on text in QuickLook nothing happens, double-click the file to open. If you write the QLEnableTextSelection key into com.apple.finder (.plist) then log out, reboot or kill the Finder, you can click on text and it actually highlights (cue angelic chorus):
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE
And to kill the finder:
killall Finder
To undo:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool FALSE
Now take that extra hour a year I gave ya’ and sumbit an article to this site using the Submit button in the toolbar!
