Installing Solidly

System requirements

Solidly requires macOS 26 Tahoe or later and a Mac with Apple silicon. The application is built for arm64 only and does not run on Intel Macs. Rendering uses Metal and the GPU built into the Mac.

Drag Solidly.app into /Applications. Solidly runs from any location, but the command line tool and the Quick Look extension are registered from the bundle, so a stable location avoids repeating the setup after every move.

Open the application once

The Quick Look extension and the file-type associations are registered with macOS the first time Solidly launches. Until then, previews in the Finder continue to use whatever previewer macOS used before.

Grant folder access when asked

The first time a model is opened from a location Solidly has not seen, macOS asks for access to the enclosing folder. Solidly needs that access to read the buffers, textures, and layers a model refers to. See Sibling files.

The two distributions

Solidly is available as a direct download from Adversaria and through the Mac App Store. Viewing, inspection, editing, saving, compression, and Photo Mode are identical in both. Four capabilities are present only in the direct download:

The solidly command line tool
glTF validation against the Khronos validator
Quick Look previews of formats with sibling files, such as .gltf, .obj, and multi-file USD
Replacing the system Quick Look previewer for a format

Updates are built into the direct download and handled by the App Store for that build. The About window and the settings window both report which distribution is running.

Installing the command line tool

The solidly command is included in the direct download only. It sits in the application bundle at Solidly.app/Contents/Helpers/solidly, and it becomes available under that name by linking it into a directory on your PATH:

sudo ln -sf "/Applications/Solidly.app/Contents/Helpers/solidly" /usr/local/bin/solidly

See The solidly command for what the tool does.

Uninstalling

Move Solidly.app to the Trash. The Quick Look extension and file-type associations are part of the bundle and are withdrawn with it. If the command line tool was linked into /usr/local/bin, remove that symlink as well. Preferences remain in the user library until removed by hand.