I use both Windows and Mac on a regular basis. There are obvious user experience differences between the two OS. A new user that’s switching from Windows to Mac will probably notice some of them after a few hours of usage. There are times I wish some feature can exist on Mac and vice versa. For the longest time, I could not understand why Mac is missing cut & paste, and the lack of a “proper” Delete key can be frustrating! However, there are few things I do like about Mac’s UX, specifically, the ability to preview any kind document by simply press the space key. In Windows in order to see any content, you have to double click and open it in an application. Or increase the thumbnail size if you want to preview an image.
To see any content on Windows, you have to double-click to open it in an application. Or increase the thumbnail size if you want to preview an image. On Mac, you can preview anything by select the file/folder and press the space key. If you want this feature on Windows, now you can!
Seer is a Windows utility that allows you to quickly preview an image, video, files just by press the space key. It’s much like macOS’s preview feature but now alive on Windows.
Seer has a paid and free version. The difference between them is some of the features and bug fixes between an old version of Seer, and its latest and greatest version. (as of this writing the free version is marked v0.8.1, and its latest paid version are v1.4.0) See complete release notes here.
Seer is developed by a Chinese developer, and has a lot of customizations you can do with this tweak utility.
The control is quite powerful. You can change all the keyboard combinations to something else other than the default Space key. There are also settings that you can change on what file extensions are supported for preview the content.
The paid version also has a 3-day free trial. If you like the free version and would like to see the difference between a paid vs free, there are still couple days you can invest into the tools to find out if that’s worth the extra pay.
If you find spending time going through files and would like to save a few seconds here and there, Seer is a great way to quickly preview any documents, whether it’s an image file or a video or a PDF document it can preview them quickly by a single press of space key.