EPS & PostScript

.eps (Encapsulated PostScript) and .ps (PostScript) files. PostScript is a program rather than a plain image, so peek shows whatever it can extract or render, in up to four views.

Modes

Cycled with Tab:

  • Preview (default when present) — many EPS files are "binary DOS-EPS" containers with a raster preview (usually TIFF) baked in by the design tool. peek renders that preview through the image pipeline. It's instant and needs no interpreter, so it's the default view when available. Zoom / pan via the standard keys.
  • Render — a true Ghostscript rasterisation of the PostScript, shown only when a gs interpreter is found on your PATH. Higher fidelity than a baked preview (it interprets the actual vector program). It renders lazily — the gs subprocess only runs when you switch to this tab, so opening a file is never blocked on it.
  • Source — the PostScript program text. For a binary DOS-EPS, the PostScript section is shown rather than the raw binary wrapper.
  • Info — DSC header metadata (title, creator, for, creation date, bounding box, language level, page count), the embedded preview's format and dimensions, and whether Ghostscript is available.

A file with no embedded preview and no gs on your PATH opens straight to Source + Info.

Ghostscript

peek never bundles Ghostscript (it's a large GPL/AGPL C dependency). To enable the Render view, install it yourself and make sure gs is on your PATH:

# macOS
brew install ghostscript
# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install ghostscript

The Info view's "Render" line tells you whether peek found it.

Limitations

  • Multi-page .ps documents render only the first page.
  • WMF previews are detected but not rendered (no pure-Rust rasteriser) — install gs for those.
  • Legacy pre-CS2 Illustrator files (pure PostScript) open through this viewer but aren't specifically labelled as Illustrator.