Actions Menu & Preview

Actions menu

Every result — file, folder, or app — has a set of actions beyond "just open it": locate in Explorer, copy path, run as administrator, cut/copy/paste the file itself, delete it (to the Recycle Bin) or permanently delete it, and anything a plugin adds (for example, the full Windows shell right-click menu, cascading submenus included).

Open it with the Open actions menu hotkey (Ctrl+O by default) or the literal Right arrow on a selected result. Inside the menu:

• Next/Previous item — the arrow keys, or your own configured next/previous-item hotkey, move the highlight up and down the actions list. A custom binding (even something like a bare Tab key) is honored here exactly the same way it is in the main result list.
• Right arrow / Enter on an item with a submenu (e.g. a shell cascade menu like "Send to") drills into it; Left arrow or Backspace (with an empty search box) backs out one level.
• Escape exits the actions menu, or clears the search box first if you'd typed something to filter the action list.
• Type to filter the visible actions by name, the same way you'd filter search results.

Full window results grid

Double-clicking a result normally opens it, same as pressing Enter — with one exception: double- clicking the Path column instead opens the result's containing folder in Explorer, the same thing Ctrl+Enter does anywhere else on the row. A plugin's own custom column can define this same kind of double-click override for itself.

The grid holds every match rather than a capped page of them, and fills in as the results arrive instead of appearing all at once when the search finishes — a broad query on a large drive can run for several seconds, and the rows are usable throughout. Arrow-key navigation wraps at both ends: pressing Up on the first row moves to the last, and Down on the last row moves back to the first.

The window has no title bar, so its header is the drag area: press anywhere in it that isn't the search box or a window button and drag to move the window. While the pointer is over the header a grip fades in across the top of it, marking where to grab.

QuickLook preview

Press the QuickLook hotkey (Alt+P by default) on a selected result to open a preview pane docked next to the search window — images, documents, and other previewable file types render without leaving SwiftList. Press it again (or move to a result QuickLook can't preview) to close it.

Audio and video files — whatever formats WPF's built-in media playback supports without extra codecs (MP4, WMV, AVI, MOV, MP3, WAV, WMA, and a few others) — play automatically as soon as the preview opens, with a small themed transport bar (play/pause, seek, current/total time, mute) instead of a static thumbnail. Moving to a different result or closing the preview stops playback immediately. A file whose specific codec can't be decoded falls back to a static thumbnail instead.

The preview window's size is fixed and user-configurable — see Settings → General → Preview — and independent of how many results are currently showing. Whatever size you set, SwiftList automatically keeps the preview window fully on-screen: if it doesn't fit beside the search window on your monitor, it docks to whichever side has room, and if the configured size is larger than your monitor's usable area, the window is scaled down to fit rather than running off the edge.

If the file being previewed needs its own native handler to show a popup of its own — most commonly Word or Excel asking for a password on an encrypted document — both the quick window and the preview pane hide themselves for as long as that popup is open, since it would otherwise sit unreachable behind them. This isn't SwiftList closing or crashing: resolve the popup (enter the password, dismiss it, whatever it's asking) and both windows come back exactly as you left them, search text and selection included.

The preview window's header is itself a drag source for the file being previewed — drag it into Explorer, an editor, or any other drop target and it behaves exactly like dragging the result row out of the search window.

Opening the full window from the quick one carries the preview's open state across, so a preview you already had open stays open.

External preview via QuickLook (optional)

This is a different thing from the built-in preview pane above, despite the shared name: a separate, third-party application also called QuickLook (QL-Win/QuickLook on GitHub, GPL-licensed) that you install yourself — SwiftList doesn't bundle it.

If it's installed and running, the bundled (experimental) QuickLook Bridge plugin — visible and toggleable like any other plugin under Settings → Plugins — reaches it over its own named pipe and takes over previewing for everything, ahead of every built-in preview type described above. SwiftList's own preview pane hides itself while this is active, and QuickLook's own floating window is moved into the exact spot that pane would have occupied instead — visually it reads as "the preview pane became QuickLook," though technically QuickLook's window stays a completely separate top-level window that SwiftList repositions to follow along.

An action menu entry, Preview in QuickLook, lets you send a result to QuickLook manually even when some other preview type would otherwise win for it.

Since this depends entirely on QuickLook's own (undocumented, private) inter-process protocol rather than any published integration API, a future QuickLook release could change that protocol and silently break this. Uninstalling or closing QuickLook has no effect on anything else — SwiftList simply falls back to its own built-in preview types.