Disk Recon 14.1

File Preview

File Preview is a panel at the bottom of the screen that shows the contents of the currently selected file. It lets you inspect files without opening them in an external application — useful when sorting through large numbers of files in search results.

Toggle the File Preview panel on or off with Ctrl-F, or use the corresponding button in the toolbar.

Automatic Display Mode

Disk Recon automatically detects the file type and chooses the most appropriate display mode. You can also manually override this at any time using the mode buttons in the preview panel toolbar.

Display Modes

Text Display — Plain text view of the file contents, similar to Notepad. Works well for .txt, .log, .ini, source code files, and similar.
Hexadecimal Display — Shows raw byte values in hex alongside their ASCII representation (16 bytes per row). Useful for inspecting binary files or verifying file headers.
Binary Display — Displays all byte values as characters without formatting or line breaks. A compact view for binary analysis.
Play Media — Plays audio and video using the Windows Media Player engine. Supports AVI, MPEG, WMV, MP3, WAV, and other formats.
Web Display — Renders the file using the Internet Explorer engine. Suitable for HTML, XML, and files that can be opened as web documents. If the file contains malformed or incomplete HTML, the rendered output may be partial or blank — switch to Text Display to see the raw content instead.

Searching Within the Preview

You can search for specific text within the displayed file using the search bar at the top of the preview panel:

Type your search term and press Search to jump to the first match. Press it again to find the next occurrence. Use the backwards option to search towards the beginning of the file. When the end (or beginning) of the file is reached, the search wraps back to the start.

Resizing the Preview Panel

Drag the top edge of the preview panel up or down to give it more or less space. The panel height is preserved between sessions.

Available In

File Preview is available in tabs that display individual selectable files:

It is not available in tabs that show aggregated statistics rather than individual files — Disk Usage, File Types, File Sizes, File Dates, and File Monitor — because those views do not have a selected file to preview.