Press Space.

Press Space on a photo and your Mac shows it instantly. Spacebar makes that work for the files it gives up on: zip files and everything inside them, GPS rides, databases, data tables, email archives, and more. Instantly, and entirely offline.

Get Spacebar macOS 15 or later · Excel, CSV, and photos use the Quick Action

Go ahead, press your space bar.

zip · tar.gz · tar.xz · 7z · rar · cbz · cbr

A 14 GB backup, listed in 150 milliseconds.

An archive is a file full of other files: a backup, a download, a folder someone zipped and emailed you. Normally you have to unpack the whole thing just to find out what's inside. Spacebar reads the archive's built-in table of contents instead, so listing 20,000 files costs about as much as listing ten: a 3.78 GB zip lists in under a millisecond. Tar files have no table of contents, so Spacebar skims the file without unpacking it, stops at a sensible limit, and says so.

Files are recognized by what they actually are, never by their name. A comic-book .cbr that is secretly a zip previews correctly, because most of them are.

And the listing is not the end: press into a zip inside a backup, step through the folders, and preview any file right where it sits. Text, images, a database, a mailbox, all without ever unpacking anything to disk yourself.

Rides and hikes

gpx · kml · kmz · shp

The file your watch or bike computer saves, or a map exported from Google Earth. Spacebar draws the route over country, state, and county lines, with an elevation profile and totals for distance, climb, and time. The map ships inside the app, so the preview works on a plane.

Databases

sqlite

The format most apps quietly store your stuff in. Spacebar shows every table, its columns, how many rows it holds, and the first few, in a few milliseconds even at hundreds of thousands of rows. Strictly read-only: previewing never touches the data.

Big data tables

parquet

Parquet files hold tables far too big for a spreadsheet, millions of rows. Spacebar reads only the file's summary at the end, so you get the row count, columns, and each column's range without reading the data at all. A huge file costs the same as a small one.

Certificates

pem · der · csr

The files that prove a website is who it says it is. The thing you almost always need to know is when they expire, so expiry comes first, then who issued them. A private key in the file is named and never read past its label.

Spreadsheets

xlsx · xls

An Excel workbook, yours or the one someone just emailed you. Spacebar lays the grid out the way Excel does: columns at their real widths, the frozen header row, merged cells spanning, dates and percentages spelled the way the file asks. Along the bottom, the sheet tabs in their real colors, which Apple's preview leaves out. macOS keeps the Space bar itself for Office files, so this one answers to Control-Space instead.

Spreadsheet text

csv · tsv

A spreadsheet saved as plain text. Spacebar figures out the separator and header on its own, shows the first rows as a table, and counts rows without confusing a line break inside a cell for a new row. Counting is bounded, and partial results are marked. Tab-separated files answer to the Space bar; csv is one macOS keeps, so it answers to Control-Space.

JSON

json · jsonl · ndjson

The format nearly every app and website uses when it hands over your data. Spacebar shows it as a tidy indented tree that can't hang on a huge or broken file; long lists just say how many items they hold. Line-by-line JSON becomes a table, with partial row counts clearly marked when a scan limit is reached.

Code and notes

md · 46 languages and formats

Markdown renders as the document it is: headings, tables, task lists, quotes. Source code is colored by a real parser rather than pattern matching, so a keyword inside a string stays a string, in 46 languages and formats, even for a file inside an archive.

Notebooks

ipynb

A data scientist's lab notebook: prose, code, and results in one file. Spacebar renders it as the document it is, headings and all, with the code colored in the kernel's language and each cell's output beneath it.

Books

epub

An ebook opens to what the cover and first spread would tell you: title, author, and the full table of contents, read straight out of the file without unpacking it.

Mail

eml · mbox

A single saved email or a whole mailbox archive. The message reads like a message, the readable version is preferred over the web-page version, and attachments are listed by name, never opened. A mailbox lists every message and opens each in place.

Torrents

torrent

A torrent is a packing list, not the download itself. Spacebar shows every file it names with its size, plus the tracker and the identifying hash, so you know what a download holds before you start it. The piece hashes, most of the file's bytes, are never even read.

Binaries

apps · dylibs

Programs and libraries show their paperwork: what chips they run on, who signed them and what they're entitled to do, and which libraries they lean on. The code itself is never read, so a 500 MB binary previews as fast as a tiny one.

Profiles

mobileconfig · mobileprovision

The files that grant devices and apps their permissions. Expiry comes first, because that is the question, then every payload or entitlement the profile carries. Signed profiles are unwrapped and read, never blindly trusted.

Camera raw

nef · cr2 · cr3 · arw · dng

The photo your camera took, shown instantly from the full-quality JPEG every raw carries, with the exposure, the lens, and the shot's spot on the offline map. macOS keeps the Space bar itself for raw photos, so this one answers to Control-Space.

Secrets

env

The files developers keep passwords and keys in, one per line. Spacebar lists the names and masks every value until you click it, so a preview on a screen-share shows the file's shape, never its secrets.

Logs

log · har

Logs open at the end, where the newest problem is, with errors and warnings counted and colored. A browser's network recording becomes a table of requests with the slowest one marked.

One look, everywhere

ink · system · monochrome

One theme colors everything: code, tables, trees, even the map. Ink, the default, is almost monochrome: gray carries the structure and a single sepia accent marks the data. Text size is adjustable everywhere too, the panel included.

Honest limits

bounded, and labeled

Every preview has a limit, and says which one it hit. A partial result says it is partial instead of pretending to be complete.

What macOS keeps for itself

macOS offers a preview app every kind of file except the ones it handles itself. On macOS 26 that is ninety-six formats: photos, audio and video, PDFs, Office and iWork documents, plain text, web pages, and csv. Press Space on any of them and you get Apple's preview. It works, it is good, and no third-party app can replace it. There is no setting for this; the list lives inside macOS, and Apple has been shortening it a release at a time.

Spacebar has its own view of several of those formats, including the three below and ordinary images. Select the file and use Preview in Spacebar, normally Control-Space. It is a macOS Quick Action, also available from Finder's context menu or Services menu. If Control-Space switches your input source instead, change the shortcut in System Settings, under Keyboard Shortcuts, Services. Setup and troubleshooting.

Excel workbooks
Apple's preview shows the cells. Spacebar's keeps the column widths, the frozen header, and merged cells, and draws the sheet tabs in their real colors.
csv
Apple's preview shows the first rows. Spacebar's sniffs the separator and counts rows with quoted line breaks handled correctly. If a scan limit is reached, the partial count is labeled.
Camera raw
Apple's preview shows the photo. Spacebar's adds the exposure, the lens, and where the shot was taken, on the offline map.

why it's fast

Nothing is read that doesn't have to be.

Quick Look previews race your finger off the key. Spacebar gets there by refusing work, not by doing work faster.

The table of contents, not the book
An archive already keeps a list of what's inside. Spacebar reads that list and nothing else, so nothing is unpacked to show you 20,000 files.
Skimming, not reading
A GPS file is mostly boilerplate the preview doesn't need. Spacebar skips past it the way you skim a page for one name. A 39 MB, 135,000-point ride reads in about 120 ms.
One corner of the map
The bundled map covers the whole world, but your ride crosses a tiny corner of it. Only that corner is read, in tens of microseconds; the rest of the map is never touched.
A steady trickle, not a gulp
Long rides are thinned out as they're drawn, so memory stays small, while distance and climb are still added up over every single point.

offline previews

Your files stay on your Mac.

Previewing does not upload your files or request map tiles. The map ships inside the app precisely so a local ride previewed at 35,000 feet looks the same as one at your desk. Starting a trial, loading prices, and purchasing or restoring access use Apple's App Store services.

The app has no advertising or analytics SDK. This website has no webfonts or analytics scripts. Read the privacy policy for details about temporary archive files, purchases, support email, and website hosting.

The Spacebar app icon: a keyboard's spacebar key

Get Spacebar

Install Spacebar and open it once, then preview your files in Finder. Use the Quick Action for the formats macOS keeps for itself.

Archive browsing and GPS tracks are free forever. Start a free 7-day trial in the app to try every preview. After it ends, a one-time purchase unlocks the other standalone previews and previews of files inside archives. There is no subscription or automatic charge when the trial ends.

Coming soon to the Mac App Store

macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon and Intel