Quick Look preview

Free

Select any .md file in Finder and press Space. Instead of raw text with visible # and **, you get the document rendered: headings, lists, tables, code blocks, links, with the same styling as TypeFire's own preview.

It opens page-shaped, as tall as macOS's own text previews, and follows TypeFire's theme: Light, Dark or System, and Warm, Cool or Dim. A TypeFire Preview bar along the bottom shows where the note lives (its vault and collection, or "Not in a vault"), when it was edited and created, its word count and reading time, and its task progress when it has a checklist. On a narrow window the details drop off from the right. Fill the Quick Look window in Settings, Markdown uses the whole width instead of a reading column. Preview appearance, beside it, picks the preview's light or dark: Follow TypeFire (the default) uses TypeFire's Appearance, and Follow macOS turns light or dark with your Mac, even when TypeFire stays dark. Warm, Cool or Dim applies either way.

Only one app can preview Markdown in Finder. If another Markdown previewer was installed, such as QLMarkdown, TypeFire turns it off once and tells you which ones it turned off. A previewer that also shows other kinds of files, such as Unfold for archives and code, stays on, so those previews keep working; Finder may then use it for Markdown too. To use a different one, go to Settings → Markdown → Preview Markdown in Finder with and pick it. TypeFire won't take previews back after that. To match the preview to your Mac's light and dark schedule, set Appearance to System.

GitHub-style alert blocks render too, so > [!NOTE], [!TIP], [!IMPORTANT], [!WARNING] and [!CAUTION] draw as colored callouts rather than as quoted text, and so do Obsidian's other names ([!info], [!danger] and the rest), with the title you give them. The preview also draws ==highlights==, footnotes as numbers with the notes listed at the end, emoji shortcodes like :rocket:, and math, and leaves %%comments%% out. Besides .md and .markdown, it previews the Markdown files iA Writer, Typora and R Markdown save.

Pictures show when they sit next to the note or in a folder beside it, in either form: ![](shot.png) or Obsidian's ![[shot.png]]. Pictures from the web are not fetched. A preview never goes online and never runs anything in the file, so a .md from anywhere is safe to press Space on. The first time you preview a note in Desktop, Documents or Downloads that refers to a picture, macOS asks once whether TypeFire may look in that folder.