GNOME Sushi doesn’t work on Ubuntu 20.10 (much to my annoyance) but a workaround is available for those willing to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the code.
My love affair with this handy spacebar file previewer is well known. I’ve used it for as long as I can remember (and before that the terrific Gloobus Preview). I planned to include Sushi on my list of things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.10, as I had done for previous release lists.
Alas. couldn’t.
GNOME Sushi is like macOS Quicklook; you select a file or folder hit the spacebar to see an instantaneous preview
For those not familiar with it GNOME Sushi is like macOS Quicklook for Linux; you select a file or folder in Nautilus and hit the spacebar to see an instantaneous file preview. Depending on the file type you can sometimes interact with it too, e.g., scroll pages.
It’s a fuss-free way to rifle through similarly-named documents, mislabelled audio files, and obliquely-assigned videos. Sushi lets you preview the contents of a file without launching a full-blown app.
Sadly for Ubuntu 20.10 users (like me) the utility doesn’t work in the latest short-term release. GNOME Sushi 3.34.0 is the most recent version of the utility in the Groovy repos. This version has known issues under GNOME 3.38 — that issue being it doesn’t work 😅.
The flaw is not specific to Ubuntu, either. There are bugs from users reporting the same issue on Fedora Workstation, Pop!_OS, and other distros.
The good news is that GNOME Sushi devs have already solved the issue upstream. And the latest GNOME Sushi 3.38 release works just dandy in Ubuntu 20.10 according to reports.
Sadly, to get it working, you need to compile it from source. This isn’t as hard as it sounds but it is more effort than many will be putting in.
It remains to be seen of Ubuntu devs will update Groovy’s repo build of GNOME Sushi to the latest release, though a bug has been filed requesting it.
In the mean time, if you want Sushi up and running on your desktop you can do so using git, meson, and a couple of development packages. More details on that in a Gitlab comment.
h/t L.P.