The qlmanage command has a -p argument which lets you create Quick Look previews on the command line. So something like this can be nice to have in your shell profile: alias ql='qlmanage -p'.

I decided I needed something a little more featurey than an alias (because qlmanage -p README is useless). So, I made a quick python implementation of ql which has special treatment for README, LICENSE, Makefile and probably eventually other extension-less file names.