Preview Markdown In Finder

Select a .md file, press Space and read it rendered, on macOS 13 or later

Why Quick Look Shows Plain Text

macOS has no Markdown previewer of its own. When you press Space on a .md file, Quick Look finds nothing that renders Markdown and shows the raw text: the # marks, asterisks and table pipes, not the document they describe.

Quick Look gets new file types from extensions that apps install. spacebar is one, for Markdown: free, open source under MIT, and made for exactly this.

Install It

Paste this in Terminal:

$ curl -fsSL https://spacebar.patebryant.com/install.sh | sh

It downloads the latest release from GitHub, checks its SHA-256, installs to ~/Applications without sudo and turns the extension on. spacebar isn’t notarized yet, which is why it installs from Terminal rather than a download, so read the script first if you like.

Press Space

Select a .md or .markdown file in Finder.
Press Space. Quick Look shows it rendered.
Move through a folder with the arrow keys; the preview follows the selection.
Press Space again, or Escape, to close it.

What You’ll See

GitHub-flavoured Markdown: tables, task lists and code highlighted in 36 languages
Mermaid diagrams and KaTeX math, bundled so they work offline
YAML or TOML front matter as a table, a table of contents for documents with three or more headings, and a word count with reading time
Relative images, and links to other Markdown files that open in the same panel
Six themes in light and dark: Apple, GitHub, Paper, Solarized, Nord and High Contrast
A sidebar of the file’s folder that previews images, PDFs, code, JSON and CSV too

Click a paragraph to edit it, or tick a task, and it saves to the file. The preview redraws when the file changes on disk and keeps your place.

Still Seeing Plain Text

Another Quick Look extension that claims Markdown, such as QLMarkdown, may be taking the file. The installer lists any that are on and says how to turn them off, and spacebar’s General settings list other Markdown previewers, such as QLMarkdown, and whether they’re on. qlmanage -r in Terminal resets Quick Look if an old preview sticks.

Want to see it first? The home page runs the app’s own preview in your browser: try it.