Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility.<p>I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.
It's amazing to see the drive of "I know what I want to make and I do it the way I want" carry the project for so long. More than any development ideology just having the passion to continue working on whatever it is you're doing is an extremely powerful force for creating useful software. And SumatraPDF is definitely useful software, has been for a long time.<p>"ideology doesn't matter as much as doing" being said the syntax valid semantic invalid error at the end of this excerpt in the section on extensive tests being overrated gave me a chuckle:<p>> Dogma is powerful. Sometimes in my corporate life I felt like writing tests was just going through motion. Maybe we should spend more time writing code instead, I though?<p>In all seriousness I agree though. In a project where you write the majority of the code it is possible to overdo tests in a way that you are wasting more time than you're saving yourself and in a passion project efficiency isn't always as important as interest anyways.
I registered a HN account just to comment on this. Thank you so much for writing this small yet powerful software. I used it in grad school when I needed to write paper with latex and compile it with pdflatex. 2 features are killers:
1. auto reload the newly generated pdf.
2. double click on pdf and it jumps to the corresponding place in the tex file.
It was such an productivity booster.
Thank you!
This app has gotten me through so many days of undergrad. It's one of the only windows apps that can handle textbook-sized pdfs well. I can search on text quickly too, while Adobe Reader can barely open any PDF larger than 100 pages.
I have been using SumatraPDF on Windows for a long time. After opening a PDF file with it for the first time, I never went back to Adobe Reader. SumatraPDF is much faster, cleaner and less memory hungry.
Upvoted for a number of interesting and unconventional opinions.<p>Rolling your own JSON, XML, etc parsers raises some eyebrows. I guess it's sort of okay if you expect to only be reading your local config files versus arbitrary web content. Maybe then it's okay to trade off raw speed for not handing a ton of formatting and syntax edge cases.<p>Writing GUI apps against the native framework. Yup, it'll be a major pain to ever port to another platform. But if you don't care to do that, nothing's as fast and clean both to develop and for the end-user to use as every platform's native framework.<p>Unit tests are sometimes overrated. IMO, they're much more suited to building apps in dynamic languages. Unit tests are a lot less important if you have a good type system and compiler checking things already. I've heard it described before that half of the benefit of unit testing in these languages is forcing yourself to structure code in testable modules with clean interfaces. But if you can just do that anyways, the actual tests are less important.
> The future of all software is as a web app. Why not bring the spirit of SumatraPDF to the web?<p>That feels like a 180 after reading a couple thousand words extolling the virtues of small, fast code with minimal dependencies.
SumatraPDF is my absolutely favourite PDF reader, but I wish the author took security more seriously. At least for a long while there were no official releases for months, if not years, with known crashes in muPDF (for which I think known exploits and patches existed), but since SumatraPDF used a custom muPDF version, it required manual patching. Maybe things are better these days (I see updates are more frequent again), but with PDFs being a big attack vectors these days, it leaves a bit of a sour aftertaste.
Here is a lesson you don't often see, but has worked every time I've used it:<p>"<i>I was able to incrementally convert program form using Poppler API to using Poppler via engine abstraction to using mupdf via Engine abstraction.</i>"<p>Make major changes incrementally.
When I open PDFs I often want to edit the filename to adjust it to the content. SumatraPDF is awesome and opposed to Adobe Reader and other PDF readers it does not take an exclusive lock on the PDF file so you can edit its filename.
The fact that it is extremely fast is another big benefit.
Sumatra is pretty nice, and definitely an app I miss on Linux. I used to use evince, but it had more compatibility issues (it uses the Poppler library that Sumatra dropped) and I wasn't a fan of the UI redesigns for Gnome 3.<p>These days I actually use Firefox as my Linux PDF reader.
One of the pains of moving from windows to a Mac was not having Sumatra. I've been using it on Windows for so long. I have tried many options on Mac, but they just doesn't feel "right" (too many options in viewers like Acrobat, too less features compared to Sumatra in others). Any plans to create a mac version?
I love SumatraPDF. I use Acrobat Reader for most stuff, but while working on TeX documents SumatraPDF is invaluable because it:<p>- is fast AF<p>- supports SyncTeX<p>- doesn't unnecessarily lock the files it has open
Just want to come to give props to Sumatra PDF. Lovely product - lightweight, fast, portable. Mau not have every feature (not saying it does or doesn't - does what I need) but does a lot really well. Highly recommended.
I just downloaded it and I'm quite impressed with the ease of use of the color options. Just a few lines in a text file. I can swap between dark and light modes easily.<p>Does anyone know if the window background can be darkened at all? The window UI text color is controlled by the same setting as the pdf text color, so when using a dark background/light text mode the window UI text is very low contrast.
So far I used colibre's e-book viewer but after this blog post I am hooked :)<p>I like people that know to say NO and produce obviously good thing on their own.
I used Sumatra on a very old Windows laptop a decade ago, and became a fan because it was so lightweight that it rendered documents quickly, even on outdated hardware.
Does anyone know why it's never possible to just transfer money, but they ask for patreon or paypal? I live in the EU and as far as I know its super cheap to send money into a bank account. At least cheaper than what I suppose is patreon's cut.
Does it work for editing.<p>Right now I'm paying $15 a month for primarily the privilege of editing PDFs. It seems every time I switch jobs, or have to send some documents, I need Adobe PDF writer.
Any chance it'll use subpixel smoothing one day? Grayscale smoothing makes me want to tear my eyes out. It's the main thing that prevents me from ever switching.
I still install Sumatra PDF on every Windows PC I have to work on. It's a habit I've kept from the days when Acrobat Reader took like 30 seconds to start.
long time user of SumatraPDF, this was a good read.<p>> Let's say I need to do a network request. I could include a monster library like curl or I could write 300 lines of code using win32 APIs. I wrote 300 lines of code.<p>huh, reminds me of tangent I have been in the same exact boat and did the same. Then something came up with SSL and just dragged in curl and doubled executable size. I think things are better these days in WinHTTP..
> From the beginning my goal was to keep the UI of SumatraPDF as simple as possible. An 80/20 app: 80% of functionality with 20% of the UI.<p>Come on, voices! Shout! "Worse is better" is the root of all evil. It's a virus, like C and Unix, and it is why most software is so miserable.