An Obsidian alternative for the files that were never in a vault

Obsidian is a strong knowledge base and a heavy way to read one file: an Electron app built around vaults, plugins, and sync, downloading at 222.9 MB. Glance opens a single .md the way Preview opens a PDF, renders it on Space, and comes to 15.0 MB.

Glance vs Obsidian

	Glance	Obsidian1
Pricing2	Free to read, $9.99 to edit	Free
Native Mac app, no browser engine3		Electron
Built for one file at a time
Reading and editing in one view
Download size4	15.0 MB	222.9 MB

The vault comes first, and that is the design

Obsidian indexes a folder so that backlinks, search, and the graph have something to work on. That index is the product. Version 1.14 added a command for opening a file from outside the vault, and the file opens in your current Obsidian window, surrounded by the vault, its plugins, and its settings.

It is the right architecture for a body of linked notes you keep coming back to. It is a lot of app for the file in your Downloads folder. Glance has no vault at all: double-click the file and it opens on its own, the way a PDF opens in Preview, and closing the window is the end of it.

Space, in Finder, on any .md file

Obsidian added Quick Look previews in version 1.14. Glance has had one built in from the start, and it is drawn by the same native renderer as the app window: what you see on Space is exactly what opens when you press Return.

Glance registers a Quick Look extension the first time you open it. Select any .md in Finder, press Space, and the document renders with tables, syntax-highlighted code, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX math. Press Return and it opens in a window you can type in. Full steps are on the Finder preview guide.

One view instead of two

Obsidian separates reading from editing, Live Preview on one side and Reading view on the other, with a shortcut between them, and you learn to hit it all day. The document you are looking at and the document you can change are two states of one window, and you are regularly in the wrong one.

Glance has a single state. The rendered page takes typing: click a sentence and fix it, select two words for a formatting toolbar, click a table cell and Tab across the row, or rewrite a Mermaid diagram over the diagram it draws. Type ## at the start of a line and it becomes a heading as you type. If you want the raw Markdown, ⌘\ puts it in a pane beside the page, scrolling in step and editable from either side.

222.9 MB against 15.0 MB

Obsidian 1.14.4 downloads at 222.9 MB. Glance is 15.0 MB. The difference is mostly what each app is: Obsidian runs the same code on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, and carrying a browser engine to do that is the honest cost of the reach. Glance is a macOS app that draws text with Core Text and diagrams with Core Graphics, so there is no engine to ship.

The number matters because of what it predicts: a Quick Look preview has to draw before you lift your finger off the Space bar, and there is no engine to start first.

Keep Obsidian

This is not an argument for leaving it. A vault is the better tool for linked notes, daily journals, and search across years of writing, and Glance offers nothing in that direction: no backlinks, no graph, no plugins, no sync, one document at a time. Obsidian is also free for personal use, runs on five platforms, and does not require the commercial license it offers, where Glance is macOS only and needs macOS 14 on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Glance covers the Markdown that never belonged in a vault: a README in a cloned repo, a spec someone emailed, a changelog you want to skim and close, the CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files your coding agent keeps rewriting.

Related

The general version of this argument is opening a Markdown file without a vault. For Quick Look background, see Markdown Quick Look for macOS. Comparing others? See Typora, MarkText, and MarkEdit, or the roundup of Mac Markdown apps.