Give Peek a "real" QuickLook behaviour (activate via Spacebar & up down keys change active element in explorer etc.)

[jan-the-maker]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Hi developers, it would be really cool if peek could behave (maybe optional) one to one like QuickLook. QuickLook works on the Mac in the following way. Whatever file is selected in the finder (file browser) can be quickly inspected by pressing space. It's then possible to continue navigating the file structure and the preview updates. There is a windows implementation of this in the windows store (QuickLook by Paddy Xu) which works BUT is very janky and not as performant nor reliable as peek. Also, it would be great to have such a "useful" capability in peek/powertoys. It would be really amazing for people that switch between mac and windows pc back and forth.

I obviously can't assess the effort but it looks like what would need to be done is make peek always show/preview the active/marked item in explorer and follow it on the changing selection. I understand that this requires some indirect focus and getting this reliable is probably the hard part BUT i really hope we can get this. The other part is that it relies on an exclusive keypress (spacebar) in explorer that opens peek and on a second press of spacebar closes it again without noticeably changing the focus state. So, if a file is selected it can be previewed by pressing spacebar, then the filesystem could be navigated with peek updating the view and when spacebar is hit a second time peek would close/the window disapear BUT the current selected file in explorer would have changed to the last one - currently peek behaves more like a normal "file open". Once peek gets closed the user has no orientation to the last preview file.

Scenario when this would be used?

• Problem is, that the moment ... the user opens peek. Let's say goes through images in a folder and decided he wants to use the the image 21 (skimming through 21 times) once he closes peek this file hasn't been selected in explorer. Which makes the process unnecessary cumbersome and unintuitive - Quick Look fixed this long ago.  Quick Look uses a simple paradigm. Show what's selected in the file browser / follow any selection in the file browser / like a natural extension of the user and a way to peek into a selection do this all on press of the spacebar (no modifier needed).

• For people who use it on their macs every day,

• Hard to explain its magic BUT once you experienced it "it just makes click" . It's really a very smooth way of checking and previewing files. Maybe this is a "roll eyes" - moment and everyone involved knows Quick Look but if not it's really worth checking it out.

Supporting information

No response

[TheJoeFin]

/dup #26143

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!