Press Space.

Spacebar teaches Quick Look to read archives and everything inside them, GPX tracks, SQLite, Parquet, CSV, and certificates. Instantly, and entirely offline.

Get Spacebar macOS 15 or later

Go ahead, press your space bar.

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

A 14 GB tar.gz, listed in 150 milliseconds.

Zip, 7z, and RAR carry an index, so Spacebar reads the trailer and the index and nothing else. Cost tracks the number of entries, not the size of the archive: a 3.78 GB zip lists in under a millisecond. Tar has no index, so it streams with payloads discarded as they pass, bounded by entry count, bytes scanned, and time, and the summary line tells you which limit it hit.

Formats are identified by magic bytes, never by extension. A .cbr that is secretly a zip reads correctly, because most of them are.

And the listing is not the end: press into a zip inside a tar.gz, descend through directories, and preview any member where it stands. Text, images, a database, a Parquet file, a certificate, all without ever expanding the archive to disk yourself.

Tracks

gpx

The route drawn over country, state, and county lines, with an elevation profile and totals for distance, climb, and duration. The boundary map is bundled, so the preview works on a plane. Pinch or scroll to zoom out and see where you were.

Databases

sqlite

Every table with its columns and row count, plus the first rows, in a few milliseconds even at hundreds of thousands of rows. Read-only and WAL-aware; a database mid-write is shown as of its last checkpoint and says so.

Columns

parquet

Row counts, the schema, and per-column min, max, and null counts, read from the footer alone. Data pages are never touched, so cost tracks column count, not file size.

Certificates

pem · der · csr

Every certificate in the file, expiry first, with issuer, chain, and subject alternative names. A bundled private key is reported by its label and never read past it.

Delimited text

csv · tsv

The delimiter and header are sniffed, the first rows shown as a table, and every row counted. The counter is quote-aware, so a newline embedded in a quoted field doesn't inflate the number.

Honest limits

bounded, and labeled

Every listing and scan is bounded, and reports which limit stopped it. A partial result says it is partial instead of pretending to be complete.

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.

Indexes, not contents
An archive's own index says what's inside, so nothing is decompressed to list it. A 7z keeps its index LZMA-compressed; that header alone is decoded.
Bytes, not parsers
GPX is walked as raw bytes. Elements the scanner doesn't care about, seven in ten in a typical Garmin export, are skipped with a single memchr. A 39 MB, 135,000-point track reads in about 120 ms.
Cells, not files
The 28 MB boundary basemap is memory-mapped and read by the cell. A track resolves to a handful of one-degree cells, decoded in tens of microseconds; the rest of the file is never touched.
Streams, not buffers
Long tracks are decimated as they stream, so memory stays flat, while distance and climb are still accumulated over every point.

no network, ever

Nothing leaves your Mac.

Spacebar makes no network requests. Not for map tiles, not for analytics, not for update checks. The boundary map ships inside the app precisely so a GPX preview at 35,000 feet looks the same as one at your desk.

This page keeps the same rule: no webfonts, no trackers, no third-party anything.

The Spacebar app icon: a keyboard's spacebar key

Get Spacebar

One app, three Quick Look extensions, no configuration.

Coming soon to the Mac App Store

macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon and Intel