Windows 11 will take advantage of a small utility offering a popular feature of the macOS universe, the quick view. Named “Peek” we find a sort of “Quick Look” allowing you to quickly preview files.
This feature is for files like photos and text. Although File Explorer’s preview pane works just fine, macOS’s Quick Look proves more compelling due to its approach. Previewing files is quick by pressing the space bar.
Microsoft plans to bring this advancement to Windows 11 and Windows 10. It takes the form of a new utility in the suite PowerToys, “Peek”. It implements the exact same kind of handy previews associated with the spacebar when working with files on Windows 11 and Windows 10.
Basically Peek was developed in-house. Microsoft, however, liked the idea of a super-fast preview feature and integrated it into its suite of PowerToys utilities (internal release for the time being).
Windows 11 and Quick View.
The operation is very similar to that of macOS. Simply select or highlight a file in File Explorer or Desktop and press Shift + Spacebar to preview the contents of the file.
For example in the case of an image, Shift + spacebar will open a quick preview in a small popup window.
Unlike third-party tools, Peek uses the Microsoft Photos app to preview. It is also possible to zoom in or out on preview images and edit them in the Microsoft Photos app.
Note that Peek on Windows seems to offer superior performance to those of third-party applications due to its integration into the OS and more particularly into the Photos application.
In use, Peek quickly proves essential for certain jobs. For example, during a major cleaning of your photos Peek allows you to check certain images quickly before deleting them.
Peek is a useful little utility for Windows. It will be offered free of charge as part of the PowerToys. For the moment its development is still in progress. We are only in front of a prototype which is not yet operational for consumers.
Note that the PowerToys currently enrich the pane of preview of the file explorer. We have support for MD, SVG, PDF, G-code and source code files for over 150 file extensions.