Comment by isaacfrond

3 years ago

This is the reason I like SumatraPDF. It has an old-fashioned user interface, a rather limited set of features, but boy it opens fast. I wish there were more apps in that mold.

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isaacfrond

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linhns  3 years ago

I’d go further and say it’s the best app I’ve ever used on Windows. Snappy, Vim controls, can’t ask for more than that.

_dain_  3 years ago

Zathura is a fast PDF viewer for Unixes, it's simple and snappy like Sumatra.

  • bee_rider  3 years ago

    In general Linux seems pretty snappy. I like evince, which is not particularly svelte (but it does color inverted rendering and reloads your PDFs when they change on the disk, so it is nice for writing at night).

    He mentions Linux in the blog post. But then goes off on a tangent about cross-platform programs. I think he must be primarily a windows guy or something? In general cross platform programs suck, it is well known, so everyone avoids them.

PhilipRoman  3 years ago

I can also vouch for Sumatra.

Personal anecdote: my laptop (6 years old and outdated long before it was manufactured) was thrashing with 99% ram used and disk bandwidth maxed out due to a combination of a 100-tab Chrome monster and doing pacman -Syu on my Arch Linux WSL (I think it might be fixed now, but some time ago WSL file cache would eat all your Windows ram). After accidentally clicking on a pdf document Sumatra somehow still managed to open it in roughly 100-200ms.

I think it might be the only Windows program where I've legitimately been surprised by it's speed.

dieulot  3 years ago

PhotoFiltre is an image editor that opens so fast that I could set it as my image viewer back when I used Windows, on low-end hardware.