When the Mac's 'space to quick view' function stops working - the solution!

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This is a really odd Mac OS bug - I'm so reliant on pressing the space bar in Finder to look at or play files (e.g. PDFs or MP3s or MP4s) that, when it stopped working altogether, I was thrown. A dialog comes up with information on the file but there's no preview. At all.

And restarting Mac OS doesn't help. Clearly something is well and truly stuck at the system level.

Happily, a pointer online led to a quick fix and I thought I'd share it here. 

  1. Start Activity Monitor (you'll find it in Applications/Utilities)
  2. On the View menu, choose 'All processes'
  3. Use the find tool (magnifying glass at the top right of the window) and type in 'Find'
  4. The process 'QuickLookUIService' will show up. This is the system process which is corrupted/stuck/foobar(!) etc. 
  5. Double click this and choose 'Force Quit'


Done! Next time this happens (it gets stuck for me about once a month), at least you can fix it in seconds without having to worry about reinstalling Mac OS.

What's odd is that a stuck process isn't fixed by a reboot, but perhaps there are associated system 'state' files which get reloaded on the reboot? Comments welcome if you can explain what's going on!

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