Desperately Seeking Preview.app

Sat 09 August 2025

Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org
Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org

In yesterday's post, I talked about the things I do and don't miss about MacOS, mainly focusing on the global menubar search as the main positive from my experience with Mac OS X.

Looking over blog post ideas note today, I realized that I missed a major one: Preview.app. Originating in the very first version of NextStep as a PostScript previewer (likely not a difficult job, as NextStep's display subsystem was based on Display Postscript), Preview grew over the years to the point that it became a much more functional PDF utility than "proper" Adobe Acrobat (to say nothing of far more enjoyable to use: Acrobat is such a turd!!! 💩)

I often used Preview for annotating and signing PDFs. It was simply the best PDF program I had ever used, and did a lot for me in my daily work.

When I switched back to using the Linux desktop full-time, I started searching for a Preview.app replacement.

Believe me when I tell you that I pretty much tried them all (not including non-FOSS programs). There are some really nice and fairly fully-featured PDF viewers like Okular and Evince, some very nice minialist viewers like Zathura, and some really excellent markup/editing utilities, but there are none that do it all, like Preview.app did.

What I finally had to do was find a mix of utilities that covered all of the features I used to use Preview.app for. There's no one that does it all, but by combining several FOSS utilites, I have been able to do all I needed to do with PDFs:


100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 50

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Productivity Unix Tips


My Favorite GUI Programs

Sun 27 July 2025

Background

Yesterday, I wrote about why I loved the command-line, and one of my good Fedifriends commented that while he appreciated a good command-line program, he generally preferred GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).

My personal history in computing started with what you might call command-line computers, although I think it's more …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Non-technical post Productivity Retrocomputing

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Anker SoundCore P30i mini-review

Tue 22 July 2025

Time for another little hardware review.

Background

I've been getting complaints that the small, inexpensive bluetooth earbuds (Skullcandy Dime XT/XT2) I had been carrying around for the past five years have pretty poor audio quality during phone calls (likely no microphone noise cancellation), so I started looking around again …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Entertainment FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Music Non-religious post Non-technical post Polemic Productivity

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Some thoughts on Android launchers, or, The Need For Spatial Regularity In Touch Interfaces

Sun 13 July 2025

Background

I've used android as my main mobile OS for about four and a half years, and used it previously for about a year and a half before then. In total, I've spent eight and two thirds years on iOS, and six and one third years on Android (so far …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Bible Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post Productivity

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Unix Data Compression Shootout

Fri 23 May 2025

I wanted to try a new-to-me compressor, lz4, but it turned into a full ADHD-fueled file compression shoot-out:

Dang, lz4 is crazy fast!

Data/setup

The corpus is a 2.29 GiB uncompressed tar file consisting of several years worth of GPS data in various plain-text formats.
The computer is …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD BSD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Productivity UNIX Unix Tips

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