X-RayFolders — Scan through your folders in Quick Look on Mac

I have already introduced how to preview your folders better on Leopard with Folder.qlgenerator. On Leopard, you can just totally count on this plugin; however, when you are on Snow Leopard, this Quick Look plugin is no longer working, and I already got confirmation from the developer that they have already discontinued the development of that plugin.

Now, let’s first take a look what is it going to look like when you Quick Look your folder on Snow Leopard:

It’s great to know the brief information, like what’s the total size and how many items are in, but is it very useful? How about giving you an X-Ray device to enable you to look through the items inside the folders? Need not say more, let’s do it.

Right now we don’t really have a software to do it on Snow Leopard, but actually Apple has already included an X-Ray function in the OS; they just hid it somewhere. What you can do is to launch Terminal (“Applications”–>”Utilities”–>”Terminal”)

Once your screen is up, copy and paste the following command line in there and hit enter:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

Now, exit your Terminal. And highlight your folder, hit spacebar to view it in Quick Look. Now you should view through the skin of your folder, like this:

If you have multiple files, just wait for another 3 seconds, you will even find these icons are moving to let you scan them one by one. So what do you think? It’s not as good and folder.qlgenerator in Leopard but it’s way better than the original Quick Look already, at least now we know what type of files are inside other than the basic info of this folder.

If you decided to disable X-Ray function, just go back to your Termianl and copy and past the same command line but change the 1 at the back to 0. (1 is for “True” and 0 is for “False”)

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 0