Windows Vista introduces the Preview pane in Explorer, which shows the contents of the currently chosen file. You can also play multimedia files from the Preview pane, without opening Windows Media Player. This article explains how to use the PreviewConfig utility to register a custom file type for the Preview pane in Windows 7/Windows Vista.
Registering file types for the Preview pane
If you have a custom file type and wish to register a plain text or a multimedia Preview handler for the custom file type, you can do so using this utility.
Download PreviewConfig.zip (63 KB)
(Contains previewconfig.exe and readme.txt)
Usage
Download and run PreviewHandler utility (requires administrative privileges to run). Select the file type from the listing, and choose the type of Preview you want for this file type (Media / Plain-text / None), and click Apply.
Additional details are available in the Readme.txt file.
Adding new file types
If a file type is not displayed in the listing, you may manually type the file extension (example, .cpp) into the text box provided, and choose the Preview type for this file extension.
Example
You may use this utility to register text previews for plain-text file types such as:
.REG | .CSS | .BAT | .CMD | .INF | .CS | .VB | .CPP | .SQL
Preview Handler information
When you select a file type, the information of the Preview handler registered for the file type will be displayed in the text box. You can copy the contents to Clipboard by double-clicking the text box.
How to enable the Preview pane in Windows 7/Vista
You can enable the preview pane by selecting Organize | Layout | Preview Pane from the folder’s menu.
Related Posts
- Make the Preview Pane in Vista to Display Contents of Text Based Files
- No Preview Available for Certain Files in Zip Folder View in Windows 7 and Vista
- Show Version and Description Tags for DLL Files in the Details Pane in Vista
- Enable or Disable Thumbnail Preview for PDF Files
- Enable Thumbnail Support for .NEF File Type in Vista
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Thanks
Does the job fine but found a potential issue. Haven’t done much troubleshooting analysis though.
Here is the general scenario. I had a file type (.config) that had an association with Visual Studio. PreviewConfig reported that it had no preview type and let me assign a preview type of Plain-text of which it persisted
The registry key {1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22} that gets assigned for this type got assigned to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.config.10.0\shellex\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f} and not under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.config as I might have expected.
Bottom line preview will not work for .config file types. I was however successful in changing preview types for other file types with no prior associations.