Disambiguation
Which Glance are you looking for?
Three separate things in the macOS Quick Look world carry this name, and search engines mix them up. Here is which is which, so you land on the one you came for.
The three of them
Glance, the original Quick Look plugin by Samuel Meuli. An all-in-one Quick Look plugin covering a broad set of developer file types, Markdown included, and the reason the name is well known in this corner of macOS. Its last release was version 1.2.0 in May 2020, and the repository has been archived and read-only since November that year. Typora's macOS documentation still links to it.
Glance, the maintained fork by chamburr, who picked the project up and kept it going. This is what brew install --cask glance-chamburr installs, and it lives at github.com/chamburr/glance.
Glance, this app at glance.md. A Markdown viewer and editor for macOS rather than a plugin, built by a different developer with no connection to the two above. It ships its own Quick Look extension, and it is what the rest of this site is about.
If Homebrew is warning you about glance-chamburr
Homebrew marked that cask deprecated for failing the Gatekeeper check, with a disable date of 1 September 2026. Until then it installs and prints a warning. After it, the command fails.
Its author has moved distribution to his own tap, so brew install --cask chamburr/tap/glance carries on working past September. If that is the app you want, take that route and ignore the rest of this page.
If you would rather have something that clears Gatekeeper without a workaround, this app is Developer ID signed, notarized by Apple, and stapled, and it updates itself in the background.
Try this Glance instead
Free to read, Pro to edit · v0.2.2 · 9.8 MB · macOS 14+
What you get here
This Glance is aimed squarely at Markdown rather than at every file type at once. Press Space on a .md file and it renders with tables, syntax-highlighted code, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX math, all drawn on your Mac with no browser engine and no network requests.
One difference you will notice immediately: images. The plugin's own README says it can only reach the file being previewed, so a local image referenced from your Markdown does not load. Glance reads the files sitting next to your document, so  shows the diagram.
Then it keeps going where a plugin has to stop. Press Return and the file opens in a window where the rendered page is editable: click a sentence and type, with no reading-versus-editing toggle to switch out of. ⌘F searches, ⌘P prints, ⇧⌘E exports a PDF, ⌘T opens another document in a tab, and ⌘\ shows the raw Markdown beside the page. Reading is free; editing is $9.99 once after a 14-day trial.
Related
For the background on Quick Look and Markdown, see Markdown Quick Look for macOS or the Finder preview guide. Weighing other options? See QLMarkdown, Marked, MacDown, and MarkEdit.
FAQ
No. That cask installs a community Quick Look plugin from chamburr, forked from Samuel Meuli's original. This site is a separate macOS app, also called Glance, built by a different developer. Both add Quick Look previews, which is why the names collide.
Homebrew marked that cask deprecated for failing the Gatekeeper check, with a disable date of 1 September 2026. Until then it installs with a warning; after it, the command fails. Its author has moved distribution to his own tap: brew install --cask chamburr/tap/glance keeps working.
The original plugin by Samuel Meuli. Typora's macOS page says it does not provide a Quick Look plugin and suggests QLMarkdown or Glance, and its Glance link points at that repository, which has been archived since November 2020. If you followed that link and found a read-only project, this page is why.
It is a full app rather than a plugin. Markdown renders natively with Mermaid diagrams, LaTeX math, and syntax-highlighted code, in Quick Look and in its own window. It prints and exports PDF, searches with Command-F, and lets you click the rendered page and type. It is Developer ID signed, notarized, and stapled.
Only one at a time for any given file type. macOS picks a single Quick Look renderer per type, so with two installed you cannot predict which one answers for .md files. Turn one off in System Settings, then General, then Login Items & Extensions, then Quick Look.
Ready to glance?
Free to read, Pro to edit · v0.2.2 · 9.8 MB · macOS 14+