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Comment by mattegan | Hacker News Reader

Like others have mentioned, Sumatra is one of a few Windows-only utilities that I routinely miss when on Mac or Linux, primarily due to two simple interactions which I miss every day viewing schematics, mechanical/technical drawings or datasheets -- Alt + Scroll == Zoom and Right Click + Drag == Pan.

Does anyone know of any viewers on Mac or Linux that provide these two features? Skim on Mac implements Option + Scroll and Left Click + Drag Pan, but it's not reconfigurable to any other keys or mouse buttons.

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Zathura does that under Linux, with the difference that zoom is achieved with Ctrl instead of Alt. Right-Click dragging = pan.

One feature I absolutely love is that Page Down goes to the top of the next page. It's very practical when you want to skim something quickly, with a zoom level that doesn't fit a page size perfectly.

I really like Okular (especially with the theme that allows me to read PDFs with dark red background and yellow text), but haven't been able to run it on my Mac Mini with Apple silicon. The brew formula appears to be broken for newer macs.

FoxIt does zoom on Ctrl+Scroll, and Pan on Left Click+Drag. Runs on Mac and I'd assume linux.

Close enough?

I assume if you REALLY want to go nuclear on it, there is some shareware app that will let you do per-app keyboard emulation and rebind inputs "in flight" or something.

I believe https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ is the standard solution.

The linux version of foxit is absolute trash. They stopped development on years ago. It looks 1990 bad, a lot of features are missing.

It actually runs better under wine, with all sorts of errors that pop up because its updater Service can’t be found.

I use qpdfview and I'm very happy. Loads of customisability.

> Skim on Mac implements Option + Scroll and Left Click + Drag Pan, but it's not reconfigurable to any other keys or mouse buttons

You can use Karabiner Elements + BetterTouchTool to rebind that when Skim is in the foreground?

Every browser pdf reader I've seen handles the alt+scroll for zooming (since the browser itself does it) Not sure about panning shortcut.

I use three-finger drag on Mac (with a magic trackpad) and find that better than any combination of click & drag. Have you tried it?

That's fair! I'm just not a big trackpad person since I find doing ECAD or MCAD with a trackpad to be not so enjoyable :)

evince (linux) does Zoom with Ctrl + Scroll, maybe yours does too? I don't think it has Pan, but I'm keyboard-heavy and use horizontal scroll with Shift + Scroll.

Middle button and drag moves the text wherever you drag it.

The evince feature I can't live without is the find, which shows a side panel with all matches in the document along with a bit of context. I wish all document find everywhere did this.

Evince uses middle-click to pan

I'm in the same boat. It's almost the only application I miss! I use Okular but I think Sumatra just has the right UI for me.

Can it run under Wine on Linux?

Yes, it runs under Wine or CrossOver on Linux and Mac.

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