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Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

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Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#141

Post by throwaway2037 »

hedora wrote: post #75

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…

Do you have an open source library or reference code to share? It sounds like a good idea.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#142

Post by throwaway2037 »

anta40 wrote: post #62

>> 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

It is the first time I heard that Qt was bloated. Is this true? If so, I would like to know what other UI toolkits do that is less bloated.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#143

Post by tomcam »

Joker_vD wrote: post #51
nickjj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 trie…

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…

Fricking awesome.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#144

Post by piokoch »

I have open a few bigger PDF files with Sumatra. It is insanely fast, it starts insanely fast. Or maybe Sumatra is just normal, we got used to dealing with crappy, slow, bloated software "because RAM and CPU is cheap" and forgot that stuff can work so good.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#145

Post by DeathArrow »

nix23 wrote: post #42
nickjj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 trie…

I add 7-Zip and SpeedCrunch to the list

And Paint.NET.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#146

Post by DeathArrow »

nickjj wrote: post #35
agubelu wrote: post #2

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.

> 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 trie…

Paint.NET is another must have for me. I do have Photoshop installed but for some very simple things I don't have to load Photoshop.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#147

Post by pcdevils »

kjksf wrote: post #60

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…

Used Sumatra for so so long, always used ninite to batch install basic apps on new machines and one of the pdf apps they have as an option on the free ninite page is sumatrapdf. Great app. Thanks for all the effort

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#148

Post by pcdevils »

grudg3 wrote: post #101
grishka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Part of the push to use the browsers pdf engine was a result of Adobe acrobat being an endless festival of security bugs. Loading it in the browser allows them to reuse the same sandboxing. Pretty good idea for most folk. I like sumatrapdf because it keeps track of the pdfs I have open and the page. Like having an ebook reader on windows that doesn't suck.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#149

Post by Haga »

kjksf wrote: post #60

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…

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