macOS’s Quick Look feature lets you quickly preview a selected file by pressing the spacebar. If it is effective with common files, it is sometimes limited on certain formats by displaying only little information. Fortunately, a plug-in called Glance offers to make the Glance function compatible with a greater number of formats.
Glance is a new version of… Glance, a utility we were talking about in 2020 whose development has been abandoned. A team of developers rolled up their sleeves to take over the project in order to adapt it to modern OSs, while solving a few bugs along the way.
Like its big brother, this plug-in allows you to have better previews of certain types of files: those containing code (.cpp, .js, .json, .py, .swift, .yml…), those in Markdown (.md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .mkd, .Rmd), but also archives (.tar, .tar.gz, .zip), Jupyter files (.ipynb) or spreadsheets (. tab, .tsv).
Glance supports dark mode and the developers promise that it shouldn’t be taken down anytime soon as it’s based on the new Quick Look API brought by macOS Catalina. Therefore, this version of the plug-in will not work with previous OSs. The developers point out that some previews of large files may not appear to avoid slowing down your Mac.
Glance installs through Github an unsigned application. You will have to sign it yourself, which is not very complicated but which remains a potentially risky process for your Mac. The developers explain that they are looking for a way to publish their project on the App Store, and we recommend that you wait a bit if you don’t know too much about it.
