Glance

Welcome to Glance, a sleek, minimal, zero-setup local file previewer designed specifically for modern web developers.

Glance runs seamlessly from your terminal, allowing you to instantly boot up live, interactive previews of single-file components (.tsx, .jsx), rich documents (.md, .mdx), and markup strings (.html, .svg) straight from your local file system — without needing to meticulously bootstrap or configure custom environments just to look at an isolated file!

Features

• Live TSX & JSX Previews: Hooks into the CodeSandbox runtime (Sandpack) to instantly bundle and actively render React components locally. Say goodbye to dummy placeholder files! Simply browse to a component on your hard drive, toggle the Show Code panel, and interact directly.
• Rich Markdown Formatting: Reads your local .md and .mdx files and renders them natively using Github-flavored markdown styling logic.
• Native Browser Integrations: Glance automatically delegates folder selection universally across OS environments (macOS, Windows, and Linux). Simply hit the ... dashboard button, and a native filesystem dialog will seamlessly hook into your machine's directories to pinpoint whichever codebase you want to inspect.

Quick Start

Glance runs completely completely detached from your primary application codebase. Because it proxies your filesystem securely through a local Express API, you never need to install Glance natively onto your production projects!

# 1. Clone the repository anywhere broadly accessible on your system
git clone https://github.com/jeshuawoon/glance.git

# 2. Navigate and install dependencies
cd glance
npm install

# 3. Fire up the development engine
npm run dev

By default, the concurrently running servers spin up a frontend view deployed at http://localhost:5174/.

1. Open your browser directly to the localhost origin.
2. Click the ... outline button inside the top preview header.
3. A native file dialog will securely pop open on your computer allowing you to lock onto wherever your current projects are hiding to instantly preview them!

Stack

• React 19 & Vite - High performance frontend bundler.
• Express.js - Securely acts as natively exposed API traversing local disk volumes.
• Sandpack React (@codesandbox/sandpack-react) - Zero-configuration React ecosystem parsing logic.
• Vanilla CSS - Minimalist variable-based grid themes.