WizLook
Open the files your Mac refuses to
The files Google Drive leaves in your Drive folder are not documents — they are notes saying where a document lives. Double-click one and your browser takes over. WizLook opens them properly, read-only, in a window of their own. It does the same for Markdown, SVG and Excalidraw drawings, and it gives every one of them a real preview in the Finder.
WizLook is short for Wizard's Look — one glance at what a file is really holding, from the same hut as the rest of Wizhut.
What is a .gdoc file, anyway?
When Google Drive for desktop syncs a folder to your Mac, the documents in it stay on Google's servers. What lands on disk is a stand-in a few hundred bytes long, holding little more than the document's address. The Finder shows it as a blank icon, Spotlight has nothing to find in it, pressing Space previews nothing, and opening it throws you into a browser tab. Seventeen extensions work this way — .gdoc, .gsheet, .gslides and the rest — and until now none of them had an app on your Mac that would simply show you the document.
Four kinds of file
One window, four things it knows how to show.
There is no import step and no second app. Open the file and WizLook works out what it is looking at.
Google Drive documents
Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and My Maps open as the document, read-only, inside the app. Eleven further kinds — Sites, Keep, Apps Script, Vids and the rest — have no read-only page to show, so you get their details and a way into the browser instead.
Markdown
Rendered the way a README reads on the web: headings, tables, task lists, code blocks, quotes, and front matter folded out of the way instead of mistaken for a title. Save the file from your editor and the window catches up without losing your place.
SVG images
Shown centred on a checkerboard at their own size, or scaled to the window when the file does not state one. Zoom in and out as you would anywhere else. Compressed SVGs open the same way.
Excalidraw drawings
Redrawn with their hand-drawn look — sketchy outlines, hatched fills, pen strokes with pressure, arrows, frames and images that travel inside the file. The drawing never leaves your Mac to be rendered.
excalidraw.comEvery Drive placeholder, and what you get
Shown as the document
Shown as details, with a way into the browser
Google publishes a read-only page for the first group and not the second, so that is where the line falls. Alongside them, WizLook opens .md, .markdown, .svg, .svgz and .excalidraw files by rendering them itself, with no connection needed.
Rendered by WizLook
This is its own output, not a mock-up.
Each picture below is what WizLook draws for that file, produced by the app itself. Drive documents are not here on purpose: what the app shows for those is Google's own preview page, so a picture of one would be a picture of Google rather than of this.
Markdown, rendered the way a README reads on the web — front matter folded away, tables aligned, quotes set off.
Read-only, on purpose
A viewer that cannot change anything.
This is the whole point of the app, not a setting inside it. Open a shared document, a colleague's drawing, a file you were emailed — and know that looking at it is all that can happen.
It cannot edit
Every way through to an editor — a menu, a link, a keyboard shortcut — either lands you back on the read-only view or stops, with an offer to open it in your browser instead.
It cannot write
WizLook has no Save — not in a menu, not behind a shortcut. It only ever asks to read the file you opened, so what you close is byte for byte what you opened.
Nothing in a file runs
WizLook shows you a file; it never lets the file act. A note or a drawing someone sent you cannot start anything, reach out to anywhere, or touch the rest of your Mac — whatever is hidden in it simply never gets its turn.
Your session is yours
Private Drive documents ask you to sign in to Google once, inside the app. That session stays in the app's own storage on your Mac, and one menu item clears it.
In the Finder
Press Space and actually see something.
WizLook brings a Finder preview with it. Select a Drive placeholder and press Space and you get a card naming the document, its kind, the account it belongs to and its link — instead of the empty panel those files give you today. A Markdown file previews rendered, and an Excalidraw file previews as the drawing. It works as soon as the app has been opened once.
- A named card for all seventeen Drive placeholder kinds
- Markdown previewed as it reads, not as source
- Excalidraw drawings previewed in full, straight from the file
- Light and dark, following your Mac
The rest of it
Small app, no ceremony.
Nothing to configure, no account to create for the app itself, and no background process left running when you close the window.
Opens the way everything else does
Double-click, drag onto the icon, File › Open, Open Recent, or drop it on the Dock. Twenty kinds of file, one window.
Paste a link, see the document
Open Drive Link takes any Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drive link — or a bare document ID — and shows it read-only. It offers whatever is on your clipboard.
Follows the file
Markdown and drawings redraw themselves when you save the file somewhere else, and you keep your place on the page.
Tells you what you are looking at
A details panel names the kind, the account it belongs to, the link, and where the file sits — including for the kinds that have no preview at all.
The usual controls
Back and forward, reload, zoom in and out, copy the link, open it in your browser, reveal the file in the Finder. Nothing to learn.
Stays out of the way
WizLook does not take over your file types. Drive for desktop keeps opening its own files until you say otherwise, per extension, in the Finder.
What it will not do
Better to know before you install it than after.
- Drive documents need a connection — nothing is kept for reading offline.
- Google decides what a preview shows: comments, suggestions and version history are not part of it.
- A Finder preview of a Drive file shows what the file points at, not the document — previews have no network access.
- Excalidraw drawings are redrawn rather than exported, so strokes wobble differently and the editor's own fonts are substituted.
macOS 14 or later
Coming soon to a Drive folder near you
WizLook is finished enough to use every day and is being readied for release — signed, notarized and packaged. Leave us a line and we will tell you the day it is downloadable, and nothing else.