FIND YOUR WAY AROUND
Preview PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more
Agents produce more than code: reports, spreadsheets, decks, diagrams. GitLocal opens them in place, on your machine, where GitHub's web UI often offers only a download link.
What you get
- PDF. Rendered locally, and sharp on high-resolution (Retina) displays.
- SVG. Shown as an inert image, so a script inside an SVG can never run.
- CSV. A scrollable table, with a toggle between the raw text and the formatted view.
- Word (
.docx). Shown as pages with the document’s own page size, margins, headers and footers, and fonts. Headings, lists and numbering, tables (including merged cells and table styles), pictures, text boxes, simple charts, columns, links, and footnotes and endnotes are rendered; table of contents entries jump to their heading. Reviewer comments are listed after the text, with the commented text highlighted. Tracked changes show the document as if they were accepted. - Excel (
.xlsx,.xls). A tab for each sheet, showing the values Excel last saved, with the sheet’s charts drawn above its table (bar, column, line, area, pie, doughnut and scatter charts). GitLocal never recalculates formulas. - PowerPoint (
.pptx). Slides scroll continuously with a “Slide N of M” indicator and zoom controls, and speaker notes appear inline. Links open web pages or jump to the linked slide, and hidden slides are marked and can be left out. Text (including multiple columns and tab stops), shapes, tables, simple charts, backgrounds (including gradients and theme backgrounds), and images, including EMF and WMF pictures, are rendered with the formatting inherited from the deck’s layouts, masters, and theme. - HTML. Rendered as a page in a locked-down frame: scripts, forms and links are off, and nothing the page links to is loaded, so opening a file never contacts a server. A toggle shows the source.
- JSON. Formatted and color-coded like a code editor, with each object and array foldable.
- Images and Markdown open in the same viewer, so nothing changes as you move between file types.
Honest limits
The PDF, SVG, CSV, Word, Excel and PowerPoint previews are read-only (HTML and JSON can be edited as text), and the Word, PowerPoint and Excel viewers are best-effort rather than pixel-perfect. Word documents flow as continuous pages split only at page and section breaks, so page numbers won’t match a printout. Excel charts are drawn simply (data, colors, title, legend) rather than with every formatting option, video and audio clips don’t play, and SmartArt without a saved drawing and a few EMF pictures drawn with scaling transforms show as missing or “not available”. If one of these gets in your way, the open help-wanted issues are the place to weigh in or pick one up.
Try it in one command
npx gitlocal
Needs Node.js 22+. Full install guide, including the macOS app →