Microsoft PowerToys may soon get Mac OS-inspired Peek file preview feature

Microsoft’s PowerToys toolset may soon be a new feature that takes inspiration from Mac OS’s file preview feature. The tool, called Peek, allows users to preview multiple file formats, including media and text documents, directly in File Explorer.

The PowerToys prototyping tool is not the first to bring file preview capabilities to Windows. We've reviewed the free programs Quicklook and WinQuickLook in the past, and they did the same thing.

After installation, just hit the space bar when selecting a file to preview it directly in File Explorer. The preview is superimposed on the screen and the entire operation is fast and smooth.

File Explorer does have a preview feature for some file types, but it disappears from the File Explorer window when activated, and the preview is limited in size.

The new PowerToys Peek feature works similarly, but with one major caveat. A member of Microsoft's Photos team unveiled the prototype on Reddit. It was created during Microsoft's Hack Week.

A demo video is provided that highlights the still image controls and preview functionality. Users select multiple images in File Explorer and use shortcuts to preview them directly in an overlay that opens immediately after the shortcut is triggered.

The actual preview of the image is fast and smooth, but PowerToys has a limitation that may degrade the user experience. Unlike the previously mentioned Mac OS tools or third-party Windows tools, PowerToys does not support single-key shortcuts. Pressing Spacebar to preview files in File Explorer is not supported, so Shift-Spacebar is used.

The good news is that the keyboard shortcut can be changed, but it always needs to be a key combination that needs to be pressed to trigger the preview feature.

According to a poster on Reddit, the initial version of PowerToys will support more features. Nothing has been said about these features yet.

According to MSFT-SAM, which posted the information on Reddit, PowerToys Peek is "much faster" than Quicklook's file preview feature.

We had similar experiences when testing other apps. We did some performance testing and concluded that our prototype displays previews much faster than Quicklook. On average 10 times faster. Our performance is similar to the File Explorer preview pane, and sometimes even better.

Microsoft has added a lot of features to the latest version of PowerToys, including an always-on feature, a wake tool that prevents the PC from going to sleep, or a color picker tool.

Microsoft PowerToys is an optional application for Windows for Windows 10 and Windows 11. It can be downloaded on the project's official GitHub repository.

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