Quick Look Showdown: Peek, Looq, and Unfold

Quick Look extensions have evolved over time. Once the category seemed to be made up of legacy junk: kernel-adjacent hacks that broke every time Apple shipped a point release, the kind of thing you install once, forget about, and eventually blame for a random Finder freeze. That reputation was earned. For years the ecosystem really was a pile of abandoned generators held together by community goodwill. Then, starting with Peek in 2021, the category was reborn on native QLPreviewingController extensions, sandboxed, App Store-distributed, and stable across OS upgrades in a way the old plugin era never was. Press Space on a file Quick Look doesn't understand, and there's now a real decision to make about which extension handles it. Aside from Peek, two apps released in 2026 are also competing for your attention: Looq and Unfold. Quick Look extensions built on native APIs are meaningfully more stable across OS upgrades than the legacy plugin era, and the ability to skip the old "extract,…