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Comment by agubelu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 tried to implement straight into Windows.

I add 7-Zip and SpeedCrunch to the list

And Paint.NET.

In your opinion what advantages does Ditto have over win+V? I've only used Ditto very briefly but didn't immediately notice anything too wildly different from the built-in implementation.

For a multi-clipboard manager I'm looking for:

    - Configure hot keys to bring up the clipboard selector (I use CTRL + Alt + V)
    - Quickly select a clipboard item via hot key, arrow keys or mouse
    - Search through the list of clipboard items immediately
    - Configure how many items get saved and when they expire
    - Ability to paste in plain-text as a separate hot key

Ditto hits all of those marks. Overall it feels like it was built by a person who actively uses it.

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 took care about this scenario.

Fricking awesome.

7-zip has already been mentioned, but I want to mention Notepad++. It's not as featureful as a full-on IDE or most modern extensible text editors, but it's fast and has a simple classic UI. When I just want to edit a basic text file I tend to use N++, as long as I'm on Windows and I don't want to boot up VSCode, let alone a full IDE.

I use N++ everyday and do love it; though I recently found out that it completely freezes trying to open modest sized single-line json (couple MB), which made me sad.

Open it as plain text. It does the same thing trying to highlight large XML files.

There is also a plugin to reformat JSON.

For me the killer audio player was Winamp. I could hide the window and control everything via keyboard shortcuts.

It was the perfect program: completely invisible and yet completely functional.

i think this applies to every audio player software that has ever been developed

I mean, iTunes exists.

Was because you left Windows? Development picked up again.

I was thinking about trying Winamp again at some point, but nowadays I use Spotify, and shuffling a ton of MP3s across systems doesn't seem as compelling as it did 10 or 15 years ago. I guess I don't really have a strong need for an mp3 player anymore.

I would add Everything by VoidTools. It completely changes one's workflow.

Not open source, but mp3tag [1] and Notepad++ [2] (which is) would also be on my Windows list. For Mac I'd add MarkEdit [3], which is less than 3MB, carefully feature-scoped, and has a responsive developer behind it.

[1] https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

[3] https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit

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.

Sumatra is the best PDF Reader. It's sad that the developer isn't making much money from that excellent product.

Why is it sad? Every time I see a piece of software that provides a lot of value and it’s not focused on money-making (ublock for example) it gives me a warm feeling.

Because there is something ironic about people (in general, including those here) dreaming about well paying jobs, but then wanting high quality products that have been worked on by people without compensation, when that time could have been invested by the worker (developer in this case) working another paid job, spending time with loved ones, and the like.

I don't think that Google, Apple or Microsoft employees are not payed. And the quality of those products just isn't there.

I mean, my employer paid 500 euros for an Iphone which maybe costs 50 euros to be produced. From those 450 euros is an Apple engineer not able to test the smalest phone with bigger fonts and to implement proper hyphenation on menu items ?

That's the virtue of suckless software too: you can do it in spare time.

It's great that it's not money-focused. It's sad that it doesn't make money despite of that.

Please forward your warm feelings to his bank account. Perhaps he can live off it

I really forgot for a second where I was, thanks for the reminder.

It’s missing dark mode that other low-key projects have adopted. It’s an app that’s lovely to use, but it sure does give your eyeballs a suntan when it’s open.

Yes, there are custom settings you can set, but for simple software, I just want a simple switch.

You can invert colors with a command line option, usually that does the trick

I actually prefer a textfile to change the colors, especially for a pdf reader I don't like white text on the "#000000" black that a lot of apps use. Instead I use "BackgroundColor = #ECECEC" which is much better for the eyes imho.

Webapps and mobile apps really need two dark modes - the one you like, i.e. light grey text on dark grey background, and another one for AMOLED screens, that's actual light grey or white on pure black.

On AMOLED displays, that #000000 not only looks nice, it also saves battery, as it shuts the given pixel off. The difference is substantial - with modern UI trends that waste most of screen space, a "grey on pure black" color scheme can often keep more than 50% of the pixels off! Meanwhile, a typical "grey on grey" dark mode will keep 100% of them on.

No AMOLED screens on pure black do not consume significantly less power than a dark non pure black color.

The power consumption on pure black vs another dark color is extremely similar. This is because on AMOLED screens individual pixels control themselves and power for off vs dark is very similar.

Source: https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod...

Not all dark modes are really that dark, though. MacOS comes to mind but there are plenty of examples. I'd be interested to see a comparison of average luminance.

Also, gray uniformity is an unfortunate shortcoming on a lot of OLEDs.

I like it when systems have a separate "dark mode," with grays, and "OLED dark mode," with true blacks for high contrast/battery saving on OLED displays. There are a few Android apps that do it and I wish it were more common.

Straight hex codes of course work, but they're not a good option if the program has more than one color.

Me too. I use OLED dark mode regardless of display technology but if mumble mumble display technology mumble battery is enough to get designers to see reason, then I’ll take the win.

win32 doesn't have 'dark mode'. If you want that you have to set system colors.

I haven't touched a Windows system in a few years, but when I worked as a Windows admin / programmer, SumatraPDF was my PDF viewer of choice. It does what it's supposed to do, does it well, and it doesn't get in my way while doing so. No subscription or cloud bullshit. And like you said, it's really small and fast. To top it all off, it runs without an installer, you just drop the executable somewhere and you're good to go; so people can use it without having Administrator access or bothering / arguing with their IT department.

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