Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> But in a recent macOS version, Apple has added a new feature to Finder called QuickLook. This feature allows users to hold down the Space key while having a file selected and view an image-like preview of the document's content.

QuickLook was added back in 2007, to OS X 10.5 Leopard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Look




And yet the exploit was known "for years" (so sez TFA). So which is it, security hole from a recently-added feature, or a "hole" that was an open secret for over a decade?


Both, because apparently a feature from 11 years ago is "recently added" per TFA. QuickLook has always worked this way (cached images go in /var on the boot drive).


Yeah, I was being somewhat rhetorical. :-)

cached images go in /var on the boot drive

Something so commonly-known that even I, not exactly a Darwin kernel dev, knew that. Another comment called TFA "blog spam", and I can't argue strongly that they're wrong.


blogspam is referring to the fact that TFA is regurgitating a blog (and capturing revenue) without adding value.

too bad the original blog (if it is the original) is undated.


It says "17 days ago" and if you hover changes to "02 Jun 2018" (at least on desktop)


> cached images go in /var on the boot drive

side-bar: how do you know this? is the information about the file structure of linux available somewhere? I've only ever run into this type of thing circumstantially.


The Filesystem Hierachy Standard is used by most linux distributions, and also by other unix systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard


Personally, I know it like I know a lot of things: poking around one day, probably looking for something else in the /var directory ("is it /var/log, or /var/logs?"), and "'ello, wot's this?". Best I can recall, I've never had a practical reason to know this, or a lot of other things I know.


It's something you come to learn after using command-line Linux for a while.


This is one of my favorite features for sifting through a large number of pictures.


What hardware do you have? On my mbp 2016 15' it's painfully slow compared to xnview when I want to browse through a lot of images.


It depends on what kind of content you're exploring. If you try browsing many folders with hundreds or thousands of videos over the course of a few hours it'll eventually cause the whole system to crash. I've found that if a video has any kind of issue playing with QuickTime it usually causes huge memory leaks.


To be clear, when I say painfully slow, it isn't actually very slow. On i7 6700 and fast ssds that apple puts in macbooks it should be instant, but it's not - the small delay that quick view has is similar to uncanny valley for me, and it annoys me very much. Xnview works exactly as it should - instant.


Sometimes it helps to "encourage" Spotlight to reindex your files, creating new Quicklook thumbnails.


I have a 2014 13" MBP.


I love it too and was disappointed to read recently on HN it's not easy to do on Linux, as I intend to switch to Ubuntu on a desktop soon. If anyone knows the best way to set it up I'd like to hear it.

However, it's become a pain lately anyway in that it doesn't work for images [maybe over a certain size?] stored in iCloud (unless it's already downloaded) which includes the desktop folder and therefore screenshots (because letting you store screnshots anywhere else by default would be logical and we can't have that). Nor does it show anything to indicate this, it just appears to randomly work or not work. I wish they'd send a lower res version for previews, or something, as more and more stuff moves to the cloud.


I'm fairly sure the default file explorer in Ubuntu/Fedora (nautilus) offers a preview spacebar function but I don't use it enough to know whether it's limited to images.

I haven't looked to see whether there's a keyboard shortcut to jump to the next image. It's not up/down arrow.


As far as macOS goes, you can point the default screenshots location away from your iCloud drive. I did that fairly early on because uploading every random screenshot I take on a 1 Mbps upload connection is insanity.


You can set the screenshot destination using:

    defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Screenshots
    killall SystemUIServer
There are a few handy things you can configure using defaults(1).


Do you store the full iCloud contents on your drive or does it download on demand? I am not sure if Quicklook works on the latter




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: