mdglance renders documents in a native WebView. Markdown can contain active HTML, diagrams can execute JavaScript or a local renderer, and images can access the network or local files. Workspace trust lets you inspect unfamiliar documents without enabling those capabilities immediately.

Restricted mode reduces exposure, but it is not an operating-system sandbox. Keep mdglance and the system WebView up to date, especially when viewing content from unknown sources.

For an opened file, mdglance walks upward to the nearest directory containing a .git directory or file. That directory is the workspace. If no Git marker is found, the file's immediate parent is used.

Paths are canonicalized before the workspace and trust record are evaluated. This prevents a symlink spelling from implicitly inheriting trust for a different target. Navigating to a Markdown file or queued file in another workspace evaluates that workspace independently and may show a new prompt.

An unknown workspace presents three choices:

• Trust Folder permanently enables trusted mode for that workspace.
• Open Restricted continues safely for this process only. The prompt returns on the next launch.
• Close exits without opening the workspace in trusted mode.

The prompt supports the mouse as well as Tab, Shift+Tab, arrow keys, Enter, Space, and Escape. In restricted mode, select the persistent Restricted — folder not trusted control or press Shift+T to reopen the trust controls.

Trust a folder only when you trust its contents and the people or tools that can modify them. A trusted Git checkout can become unsafe later if unreviewed changes are introduced.

Restricted mode keeps the ordinary viewer workflow available:

• Markdown formatting and Rust-side syntax highlighting
• table of contents, search, scrolling, and link hints
• Markdown history and file queues
• live reload
• explicitly activated HTTP(S) links, opened in the system browser
• raster images whose canonical paths remain inside the workspace

It restricts capabilities that can execute content or access resources unexpectedly:

• raw and inline HTML are displayed as text;
• direct SVG documents are displayed as source;
• embedded SVG, data-URL, remote, and out-of-workspace images are blocked;
• Mermaid and PlantUML blocks remain code and the Mermaid runtime is not loaded;
• the local plantuml process is never invoked;
• project mdglance.toml files are ignored; and
• a restrictive Content Security Policy limits scripts and resource loading.

Unsupported navigation schemes such as javascript: and file: are not allowed to leave the document. HTTP(S) URLs are accepted only through an explicit link activation.

Trusted mode enables raw HTML, direct and embedded SVG, Mermaid, remote images, data-URL images, and eligible project configuration. These features should be treated with the same care as opening the content in a browser.

PlantUML remains disabled unless [diagrams].plantuml is explicitly enabled in configuration and the plantuml executable is available on PATH. Trust by itself never opts into local process execution.

Themes in the user configuration directory are local color data, not executable content. mdglance parses their Alacritty color tables in Rust and generates fixed CSS properties; unrelated valid Alacritty settings are ignored. Malformed themes are reported and cannot inject HTML, JavaScript, or arbitrary CSS.

Trust records are individual TOML files under the platform application-data directory:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/mdglance/workspace-trust
• Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/mdglance/workspace-trust, usually ~/.local/share/mdglance/workspace-trust
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\mdglance\workspace-trust

Each filename is the SHA-256 hash of the canonical workspace path. The record itself contains the path so it can be identified manually. Records contain no secret material.

To revoke trust, close mdglance, inspect the path values in that directory, and delete the TOML record matching the workspace. The next time a file from that workspace is opened, mdglance asks again. Deleting the entire workspace-trust directory revokes every saved decision.