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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)

#101

Post by grudg3 »

grishka wrote: post #97
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…

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.

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

#103

Post by mdaniel »

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…

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

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

#104

Post by pavon »

adql wrote: post #17

> 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 ?

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...

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

#105

Post by wpietri »

"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.

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

#106

Post by zerr »

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…

What do you do for a living? Do your open source projects help with getting new gigs?

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

#107

Post by tormeh »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #34
_hao wrote: post #13

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!

Notably, the roll-your-own parts do not include core PDF parsing and rendering, which are outsourced to (possibly a fork of?) mupdf.

Mupdf is the key. Sadly there's no user-friendly mupdf wrapper like Sumatra on Linux.

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

#108

Post by dang »

Semaphor wrote: post #6

Needs (2021). Discussed at the time (133 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27968900

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)

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

#110

Post by sharno »

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…

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.

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