Looq: Preview Files

Quick Look is one of the quietest superpowers on a Mac. Tap Space on any file in Finder and a preview appears, instantly. It is delightful for the kinds of files ships with macOS, and somewhere between clumsy and useless for almost everything else.

Looq picks up where Quick Look stops. Open a Markdown file and watch it render in full. Table of contents on the side. KaTeX math, inline and block. Mermaid diagrams driven by BeautifulMermaid for crisp native output, with mermaid.js for the newer chart types. GitHub-flavored alerts. Emoji shortcodes. Edit the file, the preview updates live, with zero flicker.

Press space on a Swift file and the code lights up with the same colors VS Code shows, across 200+ file types, in any of dozens of editor themes. Sticky scope headers pin where you are. Compressed JSON, XML, plist, CSS, or SQL on one line? Looq pretty-prints it on read.

Drop a TSV and browse it as a sortable, paginated table. Click a SQLite database file and browse the tables and rows without opening a tool, smooth even on million-row tables, with column types and constraints in the tooltips. Drop a diff or patch file and Looq renders the change in red and green, with old and new line numbers paired beside each line. Multi-file diffs split into tabs.

Look inside a zip without unzipping, the contents lay out the way Finder would. ZIP, TAR, GZ, BZ2, all parsed natively in Swift. Look inside a folder as a Finder-grade list or icons view, sort and group by date, kind, size, or tags.

And there is more. .app bundles, .ipa, .pkg, .dmg, .iso, .torrent, and provisioning or configuration profiles open with full metadata: Info.plist, signing, and entitlements. The pieces Apple left out of Quick Look, Looq quietly puts back.