[HN Gopher] Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open...
___________________________________________________________________
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows
app (2021)
Author : pabs3
Score : 474 points
Date : 2023-03-08 06:03 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kowalczyk.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kowalczyk.info)
| yodon wrote:
| I'll add a shout out to Paint.NET here. Couldn't live without it.
| nimrody wrote:
| Not sure what's your use case, but for me photopea.com made
| paint.net redundant. Definitely worth checking out.
| yodon wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder - I just switched to OSX and had been
| looking unsuccessfully for a Paint.NET equivalent for the
| Mac. Photopea.com should do it.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Wow, someone that didn't use Electron for writing desktop apps?
| Focus on speed and simplicity?
|
| Basically every app should be like this.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Love love love it, using it all the time.
| andai wrote:
| In terms of making it a web app, easiest way would probably be
| pcjs, a stripped down tiny linux, and Wine xD
| taneq wrote:
| Been using SumatraPDF for probably a decade now and it's always
| been great. Thanks, Chris!
|
| If there's one feature I'd absolutely love, because it'd let me
| delete Acrobat Reader again, it'd be digital signatures. Clients
| demanding that documents be digitally signed (but self-issued
| certs were ok?!) was the only reason I grudgingly reinstated it
| on one of my machines.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Sumatra is one of the first things I install on new Windows
| setups. Something refreshing about having PDFs open instantly.
| Screw adobe. Microsoft Edge meets my needs when it comes to PDF
| signing
| bluedino wrote:
| After Foxit started to imitate the worst parts of Adobe Acrobat
| Reader, I re-discovered SumatraPDF. What a refreshing piece of
| software to use, the lack of bullshit is amazing.
|
| Of course, it's blocked at work so I can't use it on my Windows
| machine.
| app4soft wrote:
| [flagged]
| slurpyb wrote:
| I've unfortunately fallen into Calibre. Only because many years
| ago I had issues with SunatraPDF. Calibre is..... just strangest
| software. I still fumble around with it and it gets super slow.
| Great read thank you
| wpietri wrote:
| "Getting early users, learning what features they want the most
| beats toiling for months or years and implementing lots of
| features before you know anyone even cares."
|
| Yes, yes, yes. I wasted far too much of my life building things
| that nobody actually cared about because some executives spent
| far too long in conference rooms huffing each other's farts and
| creating product plans that were bigger fantasies than anything
| Tolkein ever wrote.
|
| And I'm not even mad about the bullshit, really. By all means
| create the fantasy-filled documents if that's what it takes to
| get funding/approval. The part that kills me is when people start
| believing their own bullshit. Dream big but work small. And then
| ship! Close those feedback loops.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I agree with his points about treating it like commercial
| software (in terms of having a website/screenshots/etc) but
| paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks,
| the more I assume there's going to be a catch. When you find a
| utility which has a site that looks like Richard Stallman's
| website you breathe easily because it's unlikely there's going to
| be any time-limited trial version, subscription models, ads-in-
| application, etc.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > but paradoxically the more professional an open source site
| looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch
|
| I hate to admit this, but I feel the same way when it comes to
| programmers themselves.
|
| I've tried very, very hard to be mindful of this in an effort
| to correct it, but I still have this gut feeling when I
| encounter a fellow programmer with the general put-together-
| ness of someone in the C-suite.
|
| What makes it worse is that I've had this gut feeling validated
| several times in the past. I once worked with a very cover-of-
| GQ programmer who, after ten+ years in the industry, would
| struggle with FizzBuzz-esque problems.
| sph wrote:
| Likewise, I'd never trust a software engineer in a suit,
| unless it's for a project written in Java or COBOL.
|
| Nor a sysadmin that isn't wearing black, running Linux and/or
| listening to metal. Unless they have a white beard, then you
| know they have been around for a while.
|
| (Just partially serious here, don't read too much into it.
| But you know it's true.)
| netr0ute wrote:
| Although this may be true for you, as shown by SumatraPDF, this
| is probably a characteristic of only a small demographic.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yup, if I use a software that looks like a shareware site from
| the early 2000s, I use it knowing it's been reliable for a long
| long time.
| thejosh wrote:
| PDF readers are probably the opposite for the target
| demographic, given it's for Windows. It's a great reader last
| time I used it.
|
| But agreed, many forget certain programs/tools/etc don't need
| to be actively to be updated once they just "work". Unless it's
| been rewritten in Rust, or if it's slightly older Go ;-).
| unity1001 wrote:
| On the contrary. As a user, if I cannot see that the software
| makers are either a big, well backed project OR at least they
| are able to sustain themselves by selling premium versions etc,
| I avoid using it. Most of the projects that cannot fund
| themselves eventually get abandoned, leaving you, as the user,
| hanging.
|
| After getting burned by that a few times, I learned that the
| only way to deal with it was to ensure that those who run a
| project will be able to justify putting time into it when the
| actual realities and responsibilities of life like career,
| family, children etc start raining down.
|
| Its all fun and games when you are in college or fresh out of
| college and maintaining an open source project. But the time
| and effort put into it suddenly becomes difficult to justify
| when you have more responsibilities at work, or even further, a
| family to which you have to justify spending that time on that
| project.
|
| Now, the assumption of open source community is that, when that
| happens, someone else will take over the project and it will
| just keep going on.
|
| Except it rarely happens except for very large projects. The
| net is filled with abandoned projects. And even when someone
| takes over the project, there is no guarantee that the original
| vision and quality will be kept.
|
| So its much better to make sure that every open source project
| has a way to fund itself and its developers by making money in
| some way.
| creyes12345 wrote:
| I share this sentiment. First I try to figure out their
| monetization strategy. Not finding it is a red flag unless it
| is obviously a small side project. Then I try to figure out
| where I am in their funnel. How hard are they likely to try
| to force me to get the paid version? Finally, I ask myself if
| I see myself eventually paying for the product if I need to.
| For example, is it a company I respect and is the product
| priced fairly?
| kjksf wrote:
| SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the
| reasons I thought the would (small, fast).
|
| If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better
| way to operate the program than menus etc.
|
| Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web:
|
| https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/
|
| It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented.
|
| On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your
| computer (needs File System API). Otherwise files are stored in
| the browser in IndexedDB.
|
| Not sure if it makes sense but here it is.
| atlantic wrote:
| I just want to stop by and say thanks. Many years ago, I was
| desperately looking for alternatives to AdobePDF, the
| unmentioned elephant in the room. I found your software, and
| never looked back. It was small, fast, and uncluttered. And it
| still is.
| anta40 wrote:
| I rarely use SumatraPDF because I often switch Mac-Windows.
| That said, I certainly appreciate small fast software, e.g
| uTorrent.
|
| It's small because it's Windows only, and very likely avoid
| cross platform libs and rewrite everything on their own. For
| writing personal project, I agree cross platform my be over-
| rated. Just stick to your favorite platform. Make it works and
| optimized.
| Macha wrote:
| I guess you're talking the uTorrent of over a decade ago?
| Even on Windows I ditched it for deluge some time ago.
| sharno wrote:
| I love SumatraPDF, one of the best pieces of software that I
| use. It's stable, light, does what I expect it to do and didn't
| change interface or add a bloat of random functionality.
|
| Thanks for all of you work.
| chasil wrote:
| Some of our exotic engineering PDFs have attachments. When we
| converted to Edge, it was quickly discovered that these were no
| longer accessible.
|
| I tried PDF.js, and it worked, but we ended up picking the very
| worst and most insecure PDF viewer that exists. Guess who that
| is?
| anon9931 wrote:
| I like to have SumatraPDF on every Windows machine I use,
| because it's so fast and light. And I like that I can easily
| change the theme via the Advanced Settings text file. It's
| great! Thanks for your work on it!
| mnsc wrote:
| As an avid notepad2 user, thank you!
| zerr wrote:
| What do you do for a living? Do your open source projects help
| with getting new gigs?
| kjksf wrote:
| Retired thanks to TSLA.
|
| > Do your open source projects help with getting new gigs?
|
| I think it did a bit but not as much as I think it should.
|
| You would think seeing a proof someone can deliver a complex
| app by themselves would be enough to skip the coding part of
| the interview, but then you would be wrong.
| deltree7 wrote:
| SumatraPDF is one of the few reasons why I still use Windows.
| Glad to hear the relentless focus on speed.
| grishka wrote:
| As someone who now also works on an open-source personal
| project, I'm really fascinated by this kind of thing.
| Especially the "I don't care about dogmatic ways of doing
| things", this very much resonates with me.
|
| As for SumatraPDF, I haven't used it myself because I don't use
| Windows as my main OS, but I definitely remember seeing that
| icon on other people's Windows machines. So it _is_ reasonably
| popular in my part of the world. It also blows my mind that
| Windows still doesn 't come with a proper built-in PDF viewer
| like macOS does.
|
| Thank you for doing what you're doing! People like you make the
| world a better place.
| grudg3 wrote:
| > It also blows my mind that Windows still doesn't come with
| a proper built-in PDF viewer like macOS does.
|
| Usually that viewer is the browser, so by default Edge is the
| default PDF viewer.
| cvalka wrote:
| Please fix your printing issue
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I recall using SumatraPDF in its early days. I also worked at
| the IT department for a university and we started putting it in
| all PCs. It was fast, reliable and no licensing issues
| whatsoever.
|
| I use zathura on Linux nowadays, and it like a not-too-distant
| cousin. It's perhaphs a bit less newbie-friendly, but it shares
| the same focus on "let's just render things fast and no BS",
| and also uses mupdf under the hood.
| ismokedoinks wrote:
| Hey just wanted to say I use your app for all my reading, both
| school and recreational. Having a good desktop ebook interface
| has probably 5-10x how much I usually read over the last year--
| thanks for that!
| tavorep wrote:
| I only wish I could highlight ebooks
| chafporte wrote:
| please add viewing of 2 pages side by side.
| zczc wrote:
| Menu([?]) / View / Facing
| mkl wrote:
| Ctrl-7 (Facing) or Ctrl-8 (Book view), depending on whether
| you want the first page to be by itself (book view). You
| should probably have a look through the menus to see what it
| can do before complaining.
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| awry1 wrote:
| _automated crash reporting. Unfortunately it 's a pain to build
| but this is single most important thing you can do to improve
| quality of your software... On the server, process those files
| and generate web pages for easy viewing of the crashes._ I'm
| not a developer but I would think sharing what you can of your
| implementations of these would benefit others as well. i.e.
| good examples of _exception handlers to catch crashes in the
| app, in crash handler download symbols from the server to get
| readable callstack, create a crash report that includes
| callstacks of all thread, program and os information_ and
| possibly any implementations of the processing of the files
| Possibly these are just blog posts intended for the junior
| developer or actual github repos. Thanks for all your work!
| mdaniel wrote:
| I wanted to add my sincere thanks, too. I rarely use Windows
| except for gaming but SumatraPDF was always a must-have for me.
| I am also grateful you're a fan of the command palette, as I
| get a _lot_ of mileage out of that in the JetBrains products,
| too
| nigrioid wrote:
| I love SumatraPDF but I want the colored toolbar icons back.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| C++ leak trackers are surprisingly easy to implement. You create
| a custom allocator that has a per-type pointer to a pair of
| static ints (one for allocation count, one for total size).
|
| When the allocator is statically instantiated, it adds itself to
| a global list.
|
| Periodically (and at shutdown) log the top N heavy hitter
| allocations. In testing, assert there are no outstanding
| allocations in a static destructor.
|
| The overhead of this is a couple of increments / decrements per
| allocation / free, so you can probably leave it on in production
| builds.
| _hao wrote:
| This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey
| Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community
| rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own
| implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and
| it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly.
| Wish we had more native projects like that!
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Notably, the roll-your-own parts do not include core PDF
| parsing and rendering, which are outsourced to (possibly a fork
| of?) mupdf.
| hedora wrote:
| This makes sense. PDF is (was originally) a stripped down
| version of postscript, and postscript ran well on embedded
| processors by the late 80's.
| tormeh wrote:
| Mupdf is the key. Sadly there's no user-friendly mupdf
| wrapper like Sumatra on Linux.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| What about zathura mentioned upthread?
| badpun wrote:
| 100% agreed! I've switched go Sumatra PDF roughly 5 years ago,
| after Adobe Reader became just absurdly slow. It's crazy how a
| hobbyist can make product that's vastly better than a
| multibillion dollar company.
| taneq wrote:
| Adobe's goals for Acrobat Reader are almost diametrically
| opposed to yours.
| badpun wrote:
| Wouldn't it further their goals to make their software not
| abysmally slow? There can't be any competetive advantage in
| making something this slow, unless they did it with
| extremely cheap, unqualified programmers - then you could
| argue the cost savings were worth it.
| jasbur wrote:
| They're in a de facto monopoly position with Reader, they
| don't have to worry about users leaving for a faster
| product.
|
| Probably, all of their best programmers are working on
| revenue generators, not performance.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| You would think "reading PDFs without annoying the user"
| should be the first and golden goal. So much software in
| the modern era has horrible UX because the vendor's goals
| aren't aligned with the users' goals, where really the
| users' goals should be the only thing you care about as a
| company.
|
| At my $DAYJOB you could fire 80% of the R&D staff and
| refocus efforts onto what our users actually want, and we
| would probably have a better product which less major
| incidents. This is for a company only in the ~$100m
| revenue. Of course, we're not $WEBSCALE so maybe things are
| different for the $1bn+ revenue companies.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _So much software in the modern era has horrible UX
| because the vendor 's goals aren't aligned with the
| users' goals, where really the users' goals should be the
| only thing you care about as a company._
|
| That is the failure of market optimization nobody wants
| to talk about.
|
| It's an undeniable fact that competitive pressure and
| desire to make money incentivize people to solve other
| people's problems, leading to products that get cheaper
| and better-aligned to customers' needs over time. A fact
| that's often brought up in defense of free markets and
| entrepreneurship. What is however ignored or left unsaid
| is that, it's true _up to a point_.
|
| The same feedback system that initially aligns producers
| and consumers doesn't have a stop condition for "the most
| value for customers". There is no local minimum there
| either. That's because the market process is not actually
| optimizing for providing value in the first place. It
| happily blows past the point of being optimal to the
| customer, and continues to optimize for profitability by
| making things _worse and worse_ for the consumers, until
| the end result is just "worst possible thing that's
| still marginally fit for purpose".
| badpun wrote:
| That only happens when the market is a monopoly.
| Unfortunately, software, as it is now (i.e. almost
| completely uregulated), is super conducive to breeding
| monopolies.
| taneq wrote:
| You'd hope so, but I'm guessing their actual top priority
| is making Acrobat look cool in passing to the execs that
| they want to choose it for their company signed-business-
| document needs.
|
| These execs don't use Acrobat themselves.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| [dead]
| tpoacher wrote:
| > I learned about how Plan 9 C code had non-traditional scheme of
| #include files where they don't put #ifdef wrappers in each .h
| file to allow multiple inclusion and .h files don't include other
| .h files. As a result .c files have to include every .h file they
| need and in the right order. It's a bit of a pain and no other
| modern C++ codebase I know of maintains such discipline.
|
| I've always thought this is exactly how headers _should_ be
| treated. Effectively they should be interfaces importing
| functionality locally, and each header should make it explicit
| what is imported from name alone.
| kvnnews wrote:
| You can accomplish most of this by using forward declarations
| and the pimpl idiom as Scott Meyers recommends. Performance can
| be greatly improved with precompiled headers. Headers without
| pragmas or ifdef's sounds like masochism.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The problem with this scheme is that adding a dependency to a
| header now breaks source compatibility (even if nothing new
| needs to be linked in and a piece of a library just needs to
| pull in a different piece of itself or even of libc). It's
| pretty and clean, but you need an environment that's friendly
| to crosscutting changes to handle source-compat breakage. (Such
| as, yes, a dependency-tree leaf like an end-user application,
| or a monolithic tree like a traditional Unix.)
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| I've been very happy using SumatraPDF on Windows, because it
| redraws the PDF after the file has been written over. (This is
| especially useful with LaTeX on Windows.)
|
| When I have the PDF open with Adobe Acrobat, my LaTeX compiler
| can't write over the open PDF file.
| eirikbakke wrote:
| This is exactly my use case for SumatraPDF as well; seamlessly
| refresh a PDF that's been regenerated from LaTeX.
| rags2riches wrote:
| This use case led me to Sumatra as well. Haven't used another
| pdf reader on Windows since.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Needs (2021).
|
| Discussed at the time (133 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27968900
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _SumatraPDF 3.4 Released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31566401 - May 2022 (79
| comments)
|
| _Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source
| Windows app_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27968900 -
| July 2021 (133 comments)
|
| _Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source
| Windows app_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27963298 -
| July 2021 (4 comments)
|
| _Sumatra PDF Is a PDF, ePub, MOBI, CHM, XPS, DjVu, CBZ, CBR
| Reader for Windows_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27589337 - June 2021 (2
| comments)
| iafiaf wrote:
| While we are at it, a small shout-out to PDF X-Change
| Viewer/Editor. Best part for me is that it works on Linux (via
| Wine) and Windows.
| snielson wrote:
| Yes, PDF-XChange is the best pdf software.
| haunter wrote:
| SumatraPDF, JPEGView [0], ShareX [1] are some great Windows open
| source softwares
|
| 0, https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
|
| 1, https://getsharex.com/
|
| ShareX is the nr1 software I wish was available under Linux. It
| does so much and perfectly. But I guess the whole X11/Wayland +
| different UI toolkits makes it complicated.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Don't forget Notepad++.
|
| And honourable mention: voidtools Everything. It's freeware,
| not open-source, but it's the best search utility for Windows
| around. It beats the Windows Explorer / startmenu built-in
| search on every single axis, to a comical degree.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| What features of ShareX do you use in practice? I came across
| it around the end of my Windows usage (a few years ago), and
| the only thing I really found useful was the Upload feature to
| get an Imgur (or similar) link.
| haunter wrote:
| Making screenshots, screen recording (small gifs or video
| files), sharing the files, color picking, basic image
| editing, video converting, OCR from scanned documents. So a
| lot
| cinntaile wrote:
| I use it, it's fast and it does its job well. It looks kind of
| plain compared to more modern looking applications, but that's
| probably contributing to its speed advantage.
| greggsy wrote:
| I haven't it since Chrome was big.
|
| Does it have allow searching by folder yet? It's the killer
| feature that I need in Acrobat
| noirscape wrote:
| Simplicity vs Customizability is something I wish more software
| in general understood.
|
| FOSS in particular tends to lean into the Customizability aspect
| far too much; I'm a big fan of it, but it took (for example) GIMP
| _years_ to actually shift it 's interface to being single-window
| by default and making it less easy to close the default side-
| panels (which unless you knew how those were put together were
| also basically impossible to get back, so the thing most people
| did was either stop using GIMP or wipe their installation, hoping
| that a reinstall would restore the windows).
|
| A lot of that comes down to the rather... weird relationship FOSS
| has with depreciation; most projects will gladly break people's
| workflows because "it's just better to do it that way" and at the
| same time, you have some obscure workflow nobody but the dev who
| wrote it still relies on, so you can't update a default that
| should have been changed 3 years ago because then they start
| complaining (and usually gets to keep the defaults fucked because
| of project seniority, which in my experience tends to matter far
| more than anything else in FOSS projects).
|
| There's a balance to keeping things simple with the advanced
| tools needing to be deliberately sought out. SumatraPDF in my
| experience manages to walk that balance very well. It's the kind
| of software where just using it feels intuitive; I've been able
| to let elderly people install it and use it without needing to
| spend hours educating them on how it works. It just shows
| documents and the basic icons make immediate sense.
|
| (On the other extreme end, proprietary software can come across
| as almost completely nannying nowadays to the point where I stop
| using it because I feel like I'm getting lectured like I'm a 5
| year old. Again, there should be a balance.)
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I think it makes perfect sense for this to be windows-only, and
| it wouldn't make sense to make it cross-platform.
|
| Make a PDF library cross platform? Perfect sense. Make a PDF
| reader cross platform? You'll end up with a mess.
|
| The reader itself is mostly the UI an interacts with the OS's API
| for rendering and drawing. There's really no way to write one
| that works on different OSs unless you either have three separate
| codebases. Or you can hide three separate codebases under some
| abstraction that makes the application look alien on all
| supported platforms.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I find it interesting that he repeats the mantra 'be like water',
| which seems to partially equate to 'give users what they want',
| while also discussing the mozilla/firefox history.
|
| It hints at what I think is a natural cycle of software. Software
| evolves with its user base, its existence and modification over
| time proving its value. Then, there comes a time where the weight
| of its history (and feature set) becomes too much of a burden to
| its current user base. At that point, _something_ happens to shed
| the weight.
| hedora wrote:
| I think the weight comes from expanding teams and developer
| turnover. Small teams can avoid both these issues.
| melagonster wrote:
| yes, I want to use this everywhere.
| anta40 wrote:
| >> The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app
| is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk. The
| problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and
| WxWidgets barely works.
|
| So, how you are going to write cross platform apps, then? :D
| billfruit wrote:
| Java is still viable for many usecases.
| Ergo19 wrote:
| Do like everybody else does and wrap it in a web-browser.
| hedora wrote:
| Does wine have the ability to package windows binaries? That
| would probably be lighter weight, assuming it performed a
| tree shaking pass.
| jesuslop wrote:
| Later versions have annotation (review tools) support.
| j0e1 wrote:
| > But try to make a nuanced point about more tests vs. more code
| to your fellow developers and you'll be burned at stake and your
| smoldering carcass will be thrown to wild dogs. Village children
| will use your severed head to play soccer.
| sebow wrote:
| SumatraPDF is great, only wish it had 2 more things: Dark mode(or
| 'invert' mode, really) and a working Linux binary (I know about
| wine, still...).
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Just installed it. It's crazy fast.
| planede wrote:
| > memory leaks. It's surprisingly hard to find an easy to use
| memory leak detection tool.
|
| I can vouch for heaptrack[1] nowadays, although it's pretty much
| Linux only. It's under the umbrella of KDE, but a heaptrack trace
| only requires a CLI app, and there is a nice Qt viewer to analyse
| the memory consumption.
|
| It tracks the memory utilization at the level of malloc'd/free'd
| bytes. It's fine if your memory leak or other memory utilization
| problem is on this level. Recently I dealt with an issue, where
| increasing memory utilization was caused by fragmentation within
| the allocator. This didn't show up in heaptrack as an increasing
| memory utilization, but heaptrack still pointed out where most of
| the temporary allocations happened, leading to the culprit of the
| fragmentation.
|
| [1] https://github.com/KDE/heaptrack
| Idiot_in_Vain wrote:
| SumatraPDF is the best PDF reader for Windows
| agubelu wrote:
| I use SumatraPDF almost every day and I love it. It is very rare
| these days to have an application that is all of the following:
|
| - Small and fast
|
| - Hand-crafted for a particular platform
|
| - Not bloated with oddly specific UI menus and configuration
| settings
|
| It has one job and it does it very well. Thank you for it.
| krylon wrote:
| I haven't touched a Windows system in a few years, but when I
| worked as a Windows admin / programmer, SumatraPDF was my PDF
| viewer of choice. It does what it's supposed to do, does it
| well, and it doesn't get in my way while doing so. No
| subscription or cloud bullshit. And like you said, it's really
| small and fast. To top it all off, it runs without an
| installer, you just drop the executable somewhere and you're
| good to go; so people can use it without having Administrator
| access or bothering / arguing with their IT department.
| nickjj wrote:
| > It is very rare these days to have an application that is all
| of the following...
|
| Yep. On Windows there's: - IrfanView for
| image editing - foobar2000 for mp3s
|
| They've been on my "must have" install list for ~20 years.
|
| There's also Ditto for managing multiple clipboard entries.
| It's a good example of how a small open source tool with an
| optimized UI for 1 thing ends up being 100x better than the
| same feature MS tried to implement straight into Windows.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I use Imagine for image viewing. It has an amazing little
| feature: when you press the "Next Image" (or "Previous
| Image") button and the window resizes/moves to keep its size
| consistent with the new image's size, the mouse cursor is
| automatically moved to still be over that "Next"/"Previous"
| button.
|
| It most likely takes about 5 lines of code to implement but
| what's important that the author actually thought about and
| took care about this scenario.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| 7-zip has already been mentioned, but I want to mention
| Notepad++. It's not as featureful as a full-on IDE or most
| modern extensible text editors, but it's fast and has a
| simple classic UI. When I just want to edit a basic text file
| I tend to use N++, as long as I'm on Windows and I don't want
| to boot up VSCode, let alone a full IDE.
| mNovak wrote:
| I use N++ everyday and do love it; though I recently found
| out that it completely freezes trying to open modest sized
| single-line json (couple MB), which made me sad.
| irq-1 wrote:
| Open it as plain text. It does the same thing trying to
| highlight large XML files.
|
| There is also a plugin to reformat JSON.
| Ambitious1325 wrote:
| In your opinion what advantages does Ditto have over win+V?
| I've only used Ditto very briefly but didn't immediately
| notice anything too wildly different from the built-in
| implementation.
| nickjj wrote:
| For a multi-clipboard manager I'm looking for:
| - Configure hot keys to bring up the clipboard selector (I
| use CTRL + Alt + V) - Quickly select a clipboard
| item via hot key, arrow keys or mouse - Search
| through the list of clipboard items immediately -
| Configure how many items get saved and when they expire
| - Ability to paste in plain-text as a separate hot key
|
| Ditto hits all of those marks. Overall it feels like it was
| built by a person who actively uses it.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| Not open source, but mp3tag [1] and Notepad++ [2] (which is)
| would also be on my Windows list. For Mac I'd add MarkEdit
| [3], which is less than 3MB, carefully feature-scoped, and
| has a responsive developer behind it.
|
| [1] https://www.mp3tag.de/en/
|
| [2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
|
| [3] https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| For me the killer audio player was Winamp. I could hide the
| window and control everything via keyboard shortcuts.
|
| It was the perfect program: completely invisible and yet
| completely functional.
| scns wrote:
| Was because you left Windows? Development picked up again.
| nyolfen wrote:
| i think this applies to every audio player software that
| has ever been developed
| recursive wrote:
| I mean, iTunes exists.
| nix23 wrote:
| I add 7-Zip and SpeedCrunch to the list
| ragazzina wrote:
| I would add Everything by VoidTools. It completely changes
| one's workflow.
| xattt wrote:
| It's missing dark mode that other low-key projects have
| adopted. It's an app that's lovely to use, but it sure does
| give your eyeballs a suntan when it's open.
|
| Yes, there are custom settings you can set, but for simple
| software, I just want a simple switch.
| pdntspa wrote:
| win32 doesn't have 'dark mode'. If you want that you have to
| set system colors.
| mikub wrote:
| I actually prefer a textfile to change the colors, especially
| for a pdf reader I don't like white text on the "#000000"
| black that a lot of apps use. Instead I use "BackgroundColor
| = #ECECEC" which is much better for the eyes imho.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Webapps and mobile apps really need _two_ dark modes - the
| one you like, i.e. light grey text on dark grey background,
| and another one for AMOLED screens, that 's actual light
| grey or white on _pure black_.
|
| On AMOLED displays, that #000000 not only looks nice, it
| also saves battery, as it shuts the given pixel off. The
| difference is substantial - with modern UI trends that
| waste most of screen space, a "grey on pure black" color
| scheme can often keep more than 50% of the pixels off!
| Meanwhile, a typical "grey on grey" dark mode will keep
| 100% of them on.
| Readerium wrote:
| No AMOLED screens on pure black do not consume
| significantly less power than a dark non pure black
| color.
|
| The power consumption on pure black vs another dark color
| is extremely similar. This is because on AMOLED screens
| individual pixels control themselves and power for off vs
| dark is very similar.
|
| Source: https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-
| gray-dark-mod...
| Miraste wrote:
| Not all dark modes are really that dark, though. MacOS
| comes to mind but there are plenty of examples. I'd be
| interested to see a comparison of average luminance.
|
| Also, gray uniformity is an unfortunate shortcoming on a
| lot of OLEDs.
| Miraste wrote:
| I like it when systems have a separate "dark mode," with
| grays, and "OLED dark mode," with true blacks for high
| contrast/battery saving on OLED displays. There are a few
| Android apps that do it and I wish it were more common.
|
| Straight hex codes of course work, but they're not a good
| option if the program has more than one color.
| hedora wrote:
| Me too. I use OLED dark mode regardless of display
| technology but if _mumble mumble display technology
| mumble battery_ is enough to get designers to see reason,
| then I'll take the win.
| ngneer wrote:
| You can invert colors with a command line option, usually
| that does the trick
| Aisen8010 wrote:
| Sumatra is the best PDF Reader. It's sad that the developer
| isn't making much money from that excellent product.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| Why is it sad? Every time I see a piece of software that
| provides a lot of value and it's not focused on money-making
| (ublock for example) it gives me a warm feeling.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Because there is something ironic about people (in general,
| including those here) dreaming about well paying jobs, but
| then wanting high quality products that have been worked on
| by people without compensation, when that time could have
| been invested by the worker (developer in this case)
| working another paid job, spending time with loved ones,
| and the like.
| FredPret wrote:
| Please forward your warm feelings to his bank account.
| Perhaps he can live off it
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| I really forgot for a second where I was, thanks for the
| reminder.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| It's great that it's not money-focused. It's sad that it
| doesn't make money despite of that.
| theloco wrote:
| I like it! "If you're not embarrassed by your app then you've
| waited too long to release it"
| Aloha wrote:
| This is exactly the thing I've been looking for!
|
| I have a powershell script that downloads PDF's from a URL, and
| prints them to a specified printer, I'm using Foxit right now,
| however there have been substantive changes to foxit, and I'm
| worried about the free option going away.
|
| I'll for sure check this out.
| adql wrote:
| > This comes back to Jeff Bezos' wisdom: there will never be a
| time when users want bloated and slow apps so being small and
| fast is a permanent advantage.
|
| Did he share that with rest of the company or kept the knowledge
| to himself ?
| pavon wrote:
| He said it specifically about fast shipping, the SumatraPDF
| author extended the analogy to software.
|
| > In our retail business, we know that customers want low
| prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now.
| They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.[1]
|
| [1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/966699-i-very-frequently-
| ge...
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I installed this on a whim a long time ago, thinking I was
| getting a mediocre pdf reader. Little did I know, I was getting a
| fantastic pdf reader that I would continue using for many, many
| years to come. I recommend it to anyone unsure what pdf reader to
| get. Here's to another many years!
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I actually remember having to locate SumatraPDF for an attorney's
| Palm so he could open and view .pdf files from his email.
|
| I don't know if anyone remembers this but Exchange ActiveSync
| debuted around 2003
|
| Blackberry had their own standalone solution that was a whole
| slew of Windows services and service accounts integrated with
| your Exchange server.
| foul wrote:
| Didn't know that the SumatraPDF author had a blog, loved the read
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