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This article will show you how to Enable Text Selection in Quick Look on Mac. Quick Look is a great tool that gives you a quick look at files without having to open them. Here’s a way to make Quick Look even more useful in Finder: When you hit the space bar in a text document or PDF, you can pick and copy text from the preview.
One cool thing about Quick Look is that if you want to copy text from one pdf, rtf, or txt file to another without opening the source file, you can browse through the Finder, hit the spacebar, and pick the text from within the Quick Look preview. Here are steps on how to make Quick Look let you select text.
With Quick Look, you can quickly see what’s inside a file or folder without having to open it or start an app. Quick Look is even better than it was before because you can now pick text. If you want to know more information about this Visit Official Apple Support site.
How to Enable Text Selection in Quick Look
Select text in Quick Look
Before you can do any of this, you need to turn off System Integrity Protection on your Mac. This function, which is also called “rootless,” makes your computer more secure.
- Open Terminal. This can be done by searching for “Terminal” in Spotlight or by locating it in the Applications folder. Your version of Terminal may look different from mine, and that’s ok.
- Enter the following command into Terminal and press enter:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true
- You should be able to highlight the contents of text documents at this point, but if not, typing killall Finder into Terminal and pressing enter or rebooting your Mac should fix the issue.
- If you don’t like the results or want to switch back to the original settings for whatever reason, doing so is as simple as following the above steps but changing the latter part of the command from “true” to “false”. This simply means substituting the following command for the one in step 2:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool false
- So, that’s it! Now, you don’t have to open a file to see what’s inside. Instead, you can press the space bar to pick and copy text from Quick Look. This makes working in macOS a bit easier.
What is macOS Quick Look?
Quick Look, which came out with Mac OS, lets you see previews of many common file types right in the Finder. This includes, but is not limited to, photos and other images, plain text and rich text files, PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, and documents in Apple’s Pages, Keynote, and Numbers formats.
When a user clicks on a file and presses the space bar on the keyboard, the Finder makes a preview picture and shows it. macOS saves a copy of the preview picture on the Mac’s internal hard drive so that it doesn’t have to make the same preview every time Quick Look is used on that file.
This way, it doesn’t have to make the preview again. Even if you don’t use the space bar to turn on the feature, Quick Look may still make and store small images on its own. Just opening a folder in the Finder will make samples of the files that are good enough to show what they are.