Quick Look

Markdown Quick Look for macOS

Press Space on a Markdown file in Finder and read the document the way you wrote it: headings, tables, code, diagrams, and math. Glance is the Quick Look extension that draws all of it on your Mac, with no browser engine and no network calls.

Why macOS shows you raw Markdown

Quick Look previews a file when you select it in Finder and press Space. Apple ships renderers for images, PDFs, video, and a handful of text formats, and has never shipped one for Markdown. A .md file conforms to plain text, so the plain-text previewer claims it and hands you the source: literal # characters, raw link syntax, tables collapsed into pipes.

Quick Look takes extensions, though. An app can ship a preview extension that macOS loads for specific file types. Glance is that extension, wrapped in a 9.8 MB app.

What Glance renders

The preview is the document, not a stripped-down approximation of it:

• Headings, lists, task list checkboxes, blockquotes, callouts, and tables in real typography
• Fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting that recolors for light and dark
• Inline and linked images, including siblings like ./images/diagram.png
• Mermaid diagrams, laid out and drawn as the file opens
• LaTeX math, inline and display, typeset with no browser involved
• JSON, YAML, and CSV files, with JSON pretty-printed and colored

How to install

Download the disk image, drag Glance into Applications, and open it once so macOS registers the Quick Look extension. Select any .md file in Finder and press Space. For the walkthrough with screenshots and the fixes for a preview that refuses to appear, see how to preview Markdown files in Finder.

Registration is the part this category gets wrong. Rival extensions leave you running pluginkit and qlmanage in Terminal when macOS loses track of them. Glance checks its own registration on every launch, and Settings shows the Quick Look status with a button that re-registers the extension for you.

Rendered on your Mac, not in a browser

Most Markdown previewers put a web view on screen and hand it HTML. Glance parses the document and draws it with Core Text and Core Graphics, and renders Mermaid and LaTeX to images before the first frame appears. Nothing loads from a CDN, so pressing Space makes zero network requests and math still renders on a plane.

The app is 9.8 MB, signed and notarized by Apple, and collects nothing about you. Details on the privacy page.

Then fix what you are reading

Quick Look stops at reading, which is where every other Markdown previewer on the Mac also stops. Press Return in the preview and the file opens in Glance, where the rendered page accepts typing. Click the sentence that is wrong and retype it. Select text for a formatting toolbar, edit a table cell and Tab to the next, or click a Mermaid diagram to rewrite its source and press ⌘↩ to redraw it. Glance writes plain Markdown back to disk.

The window has the rest of what reading a file needs: ⌘F searches with every match highlighted, ⌘T opens the next document in a tab, and ⌘\ shows the raw Markdown in a pane beside the rendered page, scrolling in step with it and editable from either side.

Reading stays free. Editing is Glance Pro, free for 14 days, then $9.99 once for up to three Macs.

Beyond the preview

• ⌘F searches the open document with every match highlighted, ⌘G steps through them
• ⌘P prints and ⇧⌘E exports a PDF that matches the page, breaking between lines and table rows instead of through them
• Pinch to zoom around your pointer, so a dense diagram gets bigger where you are looking
• Updates arrive in the background and install when you next open the app

Related reading

Replacing an older plugin? See the QLMarkdown comparison. Coming from a paid preview app? Compare against Marked. Reviewing files your coding agent wrote? See AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md.