<p><div><div><div><div data-width="100" data-show-faces="false" data-send="true" data-layout="button_count" data-height="21" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/quicklookr-a-macos-quicklook-plugin-for-r-data-files/"></div></div><div><a data-url="https://www.r-bloggers.com/quicklookr-a-macos-quicklook-plugin-for-r-data-files/" data-counturl="https://www.r-bloggers.com/quicklookr-a-macos-quicklook-plugin-for-r-data-files/" data-count="horizontal" data-text="QuickLookR – A macOS QuickLook plugin for R Data files" class="twitter-share-button" data-via="rbloggers" href="https://twitter.com/share"></a></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://rud.is/b/2016/08/06/quicklookr-a-macos-quicklook-plugin-for-r-data-files/"> R – rud.is</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>I had tried to convert my data-saving workflows to <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/wesm/feather/tree/master/R"><code>feather</code></a> but there have been <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/wesm/feather/issues/155">issues</a> with it supporting large files (that seem to be near resolution), so I’ve been continuing to use R Data files for local saving of processed/cleaned data.</p>
<p>I make <em>many</em> of these files and sometimes I do it as a one-off effort, thinking that I’ll come back to it quickly. Inevitably, I don’t do that and also end up naming those one-offs badly. I made a small <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/hrbrmstr/rdatainfo">R helper package</a> to make it easier to wrap up checking out these files at the command-line (via a <code>bash</code> function) but it hit me that it’d be even easier if there was a way to use the macOS Quick Look feature (hitting <code>&lt;spacebar></code> on a file icon) to see the previews.</p>
<p>Thus, <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/hrbrmstr/QuickLookR"><code>QuickLookR</code></a> was born. </p>
<p>You need to <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/hrbrmstr/QuickLookR/releases/tag/v0.1.0">download the ZIP file</a>, unzip it and save the <code>QuickLookR.qlgenerator</code> component into <code>~/Library/QuickLook</code>. Then <code>devtools::install_github('hrbrmstr/rdatainfo')</code> in an R session. If you’ve got R/Rscript in the standard <code>/usr/local/bin</code> location, then you should be able to hit <code>&lt;spacebar></code> on any <code>.rdata</code>, <code>.rda</code> or <code>.rds</code> file and see a <code>str()</code> preview like this:</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="https://i2.wp.com/rud.is/b/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Blank_Skitch_Document.png?ssl=1"><img alt="Blank_Skitch_Document" class="wp-image-4612" src="https://i2.wp.com/rud.is/b/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Blank_Skitch_Document.png?w=75%25&ssl=1" data-recalc-dims="1"></a></p>
<p>I haven’t cracked open Xcode in a while and my Objective-C is super-rusty, but this works on my El Capitan MacBook Pro (though I’m trying to see why some <code>.rds</code> files embedded in packages on my system have no previews).</p>
<p>If you have suggestions or issues, please use <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/hrbrmstr/QuickLookR/issues">github</a> to file them. For issues, it’d be really helpful if you included a copy of or link to files that don’t work well.</p>
<p>For the next revision, I plan on generating prettier HTML-based previews and linking against <code>R.framework</code> to avoid a call out to the system.</p>
<p>If Wes/Hadley really have fixed <code>feather</code>, I’ll be making a QuickLook plugin for that file format as well in the very near future.</p>
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