Sat 09 August 2025

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:

• Basic viewing
  • Zathura, Sioyek, Okular, or Evince
• Basic annotation (drawing shapes only, no images)
  • Okular or Evince
• Flexible annotation (inserting images/signatures, etc)
  • Xournal++ or possibly Inkscape or LibreOffice Draw
• Adding/removing PDF pages, combining PDFs
  • PDFArranger or possibly Poppler pdfunite (command line)
• Extracting images from a PDF (not actually a Preview.app feature, but handy to know how to do)
  • pdfimages (command line)

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

Sat 19 July 2025

Note: When I say "Online" in this context, I literally mean "on a computer," vs. "on paper." This is the older, more classic meaning of the word, similar to "on-line documentation" (i.e., "on the computer," not "on the internet").

Background

I know a lot of folks like solutions like …

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

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

Fri 06 December 2024

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, TuxJam the other day, and they were discussing ways to watch YouTube without the annoyances that Google has added to the experience, namely ads and the inability to download videos for later viewing (also, YouTube stopped letting you listen to videos …

Category: Tech Tagged: Computing Entertainment Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post PeerTube Productivity UNIX Unix Tips Video

Fri 21 June 2024

Want to organize your photos by gps/geolocation, but don't feel like dealing with a slow GUI app?

That's ok, you can do it from the command line!

precision=2
for file in *.jp*g
do
    coord=$(exiftool -c "%.${precision}f" "$file" |grep GPS.Position |sed 's/^[^:]*:[[:space:]]*//')
    dir="gps …

Category: QuickPost Tagged: Computing Informal post Linux Non-religious post Productivity QuickPost Unix Tips

Wed 29 November 2023

I resolved never to put a web browser on this machine, which is a Thinkpad X200t from early 2010 with the Libreboot firmware flashed to it, and the wifi card replaced with a FOSS-driver-loving atheros-based card. Ever since I got it in early 2019, it's been my "writing machine …

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

Mon 27 November 2023

Back in September, I posted about using the output of cal and plain text to track things. Here is the example of that format I listed in the post:

     August 2023    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       .  2  3  .  5
 .  7  .  .  .  .  .
 .  .  . 16  .  .  .
 .  .  .  .  . 25  .
 .  .  . 30  .      

2023/08/02 326 45 …

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

Tue 05 September 2023

I know everyone's got their preferred notes app/platform, but I've been using SimpleNote for several years now, and I'm quite fond of it. Not only does it have very usable mobile and cross-platform desktop apps, it also has alternate apps like nvpy (a GUI) and sncli, an excellent command …

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