Text Selection in Quicklook Windows No Longer Works

Question

Level 4

1,003 points

Text Selection in Quicklook Windows No Longer Works

With at least the last couple of OS X versions you could enable text selection and copy operations in Quicklook windows by entering the following terminal commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -boolean YES;

killall Finder

However this no longer seems to work in OS X 10.11. The 'defaults write' command raises no errors or anything, it appears to take, but after the 'killall Finder' restart command text selection does not work in Quicklook windows. I've tried logging out and in but still no dice. I'd suspect it was somehow related to SIP but as I said there is no error message or anything to indicate a problem with the commands. I'm seeing this behaviour on both my 2008 iMac and 2010 15" MBP.

Has anyone else seen this problem and/or have any idea what the cause could be?

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11), Early-2008, 24in, 6GB RAM, 250GB SSD

Posted on Oct 2, 2015 12:04 AM

Reply

Answer 1

dr.nixon

Level 1

17 points

Oct 7, 2015 12:48 PM in response to David Shanahan

This is frustrating. I use this feature a lot to quickly grab a bit of text without needing to open an entire program - it seems strange that this would be disabled, as it is likely only used by a few power users. Why reduce the usefulness of QuickLook? With the lag time in preview that was introduced a few OS versions ago, QuickLook is becoming less and less useful.

Reply

Answer 2

David Shanahan Author

Level 4

1,003 points

Oct 10, 2015 1:24 PM in response to dr.nixon

Yes it is very frustrating, I used it a lot too, it's very useful. I've never understood why QL windows don't allow selection by default, but to disable the option altogether seems crazy. The fact that no error is raised by the command makes me hope it's just a bug that will be fixed in 10.11.x, I sure hope so.

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 15, 2015 7:51 AM in response to David Shanahan

Not sure it is productive or not, but I thought I'd say I want that feature to come back too. So useful and missing it.

Reply

Answer 4

Nov 16, 2015 1:53 PM in response to David Shanahan

Well, at least now I know it's not just me. I tried the "defaults write" command just like you described - no luck.

iMac 21.5" (late 2009), running 10.11.1, 8GB RAM.

Reply

Answer 5

Yu-Len

Level 1

0 points

Dec 8, 2015 3:05 AM in response to David Shanahan

I totally agree with you. This is really frustrating. With every update I have been kicked out of this very useful feature and now? I hope this is coming back, but I assume it has been removed by purpose. Without direct feedback to Apple, nothing will happen.

Hey you guys from Apple, is somebody reading this? Please support. Thanks a lot.

Reply

Answer 6

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,530 points

Dec 8, 2015 4:39 AM in response to Yu-Len

Send feedback to Apple. They won't see much, here. http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

As with all undocumented "features," you should always expect them to stop working. If the feature is undocumented, Apple doesn't support it and the code may eventually be dropped. The code only likely existed because they tested it out and decided not to continue development. The feature worked while the code still existed, but at some point they will likely clean up the code, or a change overrides the changed behavior.

Reply