How to Enable Text Selection in Quick Look [Mac]

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One of my personal favorite Mac OS X features is Quick Look. This quick preview feature, which can be activated by pressing the spacebar or via right-click, lets you look at the contents of a file in Finder at a larger size. It works for documents, images, and most video formats – you can even play videos via Quick Look. This feature really saves you time because in most cases, it eliminates the need to open other programs to view files.

Unfortunately, one of the downsides to using Quick Look is the lack of text selection for documents. Instead you’re forced to open a document in TextEdit, Pages, Word, etc just to copy the text that you need to paste elsewhere. Luckily, you can quickly enable text selection by pasting a single line in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE; killall Finder

Now, when you use Quick Look for a text document, you will be able to select and copy text with ease.

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Charnita Fance

Charnita has been a Freelance Writer & Professional Blogger since 2008. As an early adopter she loves trying out new apps and services. As a Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS user, she has a great love for bleeding edge technology. You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

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