Misc

Quick Look plugin for MacOS X

New Quick Look plugin that allows quick inspection of the content of a ROOT file.

Quick Look is available on MacOS X since version 10.5 (Leopard). To use QL select an file icon in the Finder and hit the space bar. For all file types supported by QL you will get a window showing the file content, for file types not supported you will get a generic window showing some basic file info.

The idea of QL is that file content can be shown without the heavy application startup process. Generating a QL view of a ROOT file depends on the size of the file, but generally it is a quick operation.

Get the binary for the ROOTQL plugin from:

   ftp://root.cern.ch/root/ROOTQL.tgz

To install the plugin, after untarring the above file, just drag the bundle ROOTQL.qlgenerator to /Library/QuickLook (global, i.e. for all users on a system) or to ~/Library/QuickLook (local, this user only) directory. You may need to create that folder if it doesn't already exist.

To build from source, get it from svn using:

   svn co http://root.cern.ch/svn/root/trunk/misc/rootql rootql

Open the ROOTQL project in Xcode and click on "Build" (make sure the Active Build Configuration is set the "Release"). Copy the resulting plugin from build/Release to the desired QuickLook directory.

SpotLight plugin for MacOS X

This is a Spotlight plugin that allows ROOT files to be indexed by SL. Once indexed SL can find ROOT files based on the names and titles of the objects in the files.

Spotlight is available on MacOS X since version 10.4 (Tiger). To use SL select the SL icon on the top right of the menubar and type in a search text.

Get the binary for the ROOTSL plugin from:

   ftp://root.cern.ch/root/ROOTSL.tgz

To install the plugin, after untarring the above file, just drag the bundle ROOTSL.mdimporter to /Library/Spotlight (global, i.e. for all users on a system) or to ~/Library/Spotlight (local, this user only) directory. You may need to create that folder if it doesn't already exist.

To build from source, get it from svn using:

   svn co http://root.cern.ch/svn/root/trunk/misc/rootsl rootsl

Open the ROOTSL project in Xcode and click on "Build" (make sure the Active Build Configuration is set the "Release"). Copy the resulting plugin from build/Release to the desired QuickLook directory.