Unified Viewer for Markdown, Code, and SVGs on Mac

The Context-Switching Tax

A typical developer's or designer's workflow on macOS involves reading several different file types throughout a day. A Markdown README. A Python script. An SVG icon. A YAML configuration file. An architecture document with embedded Mermaid diagrams. Each of these requires a different viewer: Quick Look for a partial preview, a browser for rendered Markdown, Figma for the SVG, a text editor for the YAML, and something else for the diagram-heavy document.

Every context switch has a cost. A different app has a different interface, different keyboard shortcuts, different zoom controls, and a different visual style. The cumulative friction is not large per switch, but it accumulates across a full day and pulls focus away from the actual content you are trying to understand.

What Telescopo Unifies

Telescopo is built around a single principle: one app should handle the structured files a developer or technical professional needs to read. Telescopo starts free with that workflow, then adds the creation layer when the work moves from reading to writing, editing, exporting, and asking questions about a document.

Consistent Keyboard Shortcuts Across Every Format

In Telescopo, the shortcuts for zooming, adjusting width, switching themes, and exporting work identically whether you are reading a Python file, a Markdown document, or an SVG. There is no mode-switching and no format-specific interface to learn. The keyboard shortcuts you learn on day one work on every file you open on day one hundred.

How Telescopo Compares to Preview

macOS Preview handles images, PDFs, and some basic document formats well. What it does not do is render Markdown, apply syntax highlighting to source code, render Mermaid diagrams, or provide Telescopo Navigator. For the file types that Preview handles, it is a solid tool. For the file types that developers and designers work with daily, it is not designed for the task.

Telescopo focuses precisely on the formats that Preview misses. It is not trying to replace Preview for viewing PDFs or raster images. It is filling the gap for structured text, vector graphics, and code, and doing so with a native, hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline that feels as fast as Preview does for the things it handles well.

Setting Telescopo as Your Default Viewer

You can set Telescopo as the default application for Markdown, code, and SVG files in Finder. Right-click any file of the type you want to reassign, select Get Info, expand the Open With section, choose Telescopo, and click Change All. From that point forward, double-clicking any file of that type opens it directly in Telescopo without a manual app launch.

Frequently Asked Questions