Krzysztof Kowalczyk

Great retrospective of SumatraPDF from the author: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/l… .

I doubt that's true. I have literally hundreds of ideas. As an experiment I put them on a website for anyone to see and "steal": https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d8158c803ad1/i… I'm not saying those are all great, profitable ideas. I'm saying that they are doable by a competent programmer and unique enough. Certainly not "done a zillion times by others".

I'd love to help, but my coding time is already taken building a product. I pretty much followed the instructions here: https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/acme/autocert edit, better here: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/Jl3G/https-for-free-in-go-with-lit… I didn't believe it could be that simple, but it worked first time and has proven really robust.

I run 3 websites written in Go (http://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/uvw2/Thoughts-on-Go-after-writing-3… Those are clearly not Facebook scale servers but for majority of people: you don't need this or any other such solution. Here's what I do for deployment. I have a fabric script that: - copies the new executable to the server - kills currently running executable - starts the new executable The worst that can happen is that a few connections will get dropped and that's perfectly fine 99.9% of websites. You don't control internet so the users will get broken connections all the time for reasons you can't eliminate. They shrug and hit reload button. Complicating things to avoid few seconds of downtime was not worth it for me and rationally, probably not worth it for most.

I found your blog and your diary of a solo developer building a web app [0]. Maybe the answers to my questions are there. Thanks for this, too. [0]: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/30da6655040f47e693f8e66eacd308c1/d…

Another good one is Fast File Finder https://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/fast-file-finder-for-windows/. It's by the same guy who made SumatraPDF.

I'm using Feedly. Checking it once a couple of weeks and happy about my flow. Here are the blogs that I follow: - https://jvns.ca/atom.xml - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml - https://blog.kowalczyk.info/atom.xml - https://ashfurrow.com/feed.xml - https://sneak.berlin/feed.xml - https://sookocheff.com/index.xml - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/feed/rss - https://zachholman.com/atom.xml - https://www.wezm.net/v2/rss.xml - https://alexdanco.com/feed/ - https://tyler.io/feed/ - https://tylertringas.com/feed/

Some app ideas from Krzysztof Kowalczyk (author of Sumatra PDF): https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d8158c803ad1/i…

Google tells me the help viewer uses IE7 with ActiveX to display help pages (https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/malicious-chm-fi… Given that, I think this is better removed from any system. If you have to access .chm files, I would first try other tools for displaying html help (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/articles/chm-reader-viewer-for-windows.htm… has a list)

And apparently an even better solution is just putting the size in the format itself. No need to parse when you can just seek. https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/fc9203f7c72a4532b1ae51d018fef7b3/t…

Here's an example in Golang: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/n/fuzzing-markdown-parser-written-… The short version is that you strip down the interesting main loop of your program to accept an item of input, process it, and exit, and then the fuzzer takes over.

Looks like it's this: https://www.notion.so/ It wasn't clear to me how the data was exported, but it seems the author built his own library: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad28368174c/h…

Not a direct answer, but I use the Windows port of The Silver Searcher (ag) and it works well: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/the-silver-searcher-for-windows.ht…

I think there must be something wrong with your PDF viewer. It's rendering fine for me[1], using Sumatra PDF 2.3.2 [2] [1] - http://picpaste.com/76610ba89c0650c0a80a48574c965aff.png [2] - http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

Calibre can be configured to use the OS defaults for reading specific file extensions. The option is buried somewhere in the preferences menu of Calibre. On Windows, OSS SumatraPDF will read pdf, epub, djvi, fb, chm and more. You can preset 2up fullscreen & other options, including the carnival yellow default background. It's minimal and can be locked down more than Acrobat, but has still had a handful of public security vulns (much less than Acrobat), http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html On iOS, Marvin is an epub reading app which integrates well with Calibre and includes screen temperature adjustment (similar to Fl.ux) for reading at night.

I use Chrome usually, just assign .pdf to load as a file:\\ but if that doesn't render. I'll try my SumatraPDF http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html don't load if you don't like yellow!

I am pretty happy with SumatraPDF on Windows. Orders of magnitude faster than Reader too. http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

It's the client who has to live with the design. What you like is irrelevant. If you want it to be better, show them two versions. That's life as a designer...or a programmer: "Do it both ways and see which works better." -John Carmack http://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/Carmack-on-creativity.html

Windows user here. I gladly abandoned Adobe Acrobat Reader as soon as I discovered Foxit Reader. But a few years ago I became unhappy with it (it was trending the same direction as Acrobat Reader: slow, bloated, intrusive) and found SumatraPDF[1], a better (for my simple needs) lean open-source alternative (its Firefox/Mozilla plugin works fine)! [1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

I was curious, so I looked it up: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/fofou/manifesto.html

This is really good advice - Adobe's reader is a performance destroyer. Foxit is getting bogged down with features but Sumatra [1] is simple and super fast. [1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

Don't know about the color printing issue, but I use Sumatra PDF reader instead of Adobe Reader for 95%+ of my PDF reading: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html It's free, and it's light, and it's fast. And it doesn't bother you at inopportune times asking whether you want to upgrade. Given that, why would you want to use Adobe's software? Every now and again a document won't render correctly, and then I'll use Acrobat Reader--which sometimes also fails to render it correctly. But what can you do.

Until a couple weeks ago, FoxIt Reader automatically ran executable programs embedded within a PDF document without asking for a user's permission. It was actually worse than Adobe Reader: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174612/Adobe_Foxit_examine_new… http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/31/using-foxit-because-you-think-… Make sure you're on 3.2.1.0401 or newer. Or, as you mention, switch to Sumatra: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html On the Mac, help friends switch back to Preview as their default PDF reader after Adobe Reader hijacks doc mappings.

Agreed. Adobe seems to focus on putting out new features first and fixing existing work second. I've seen it before in companies whose development schedules are dictated by sales. "Hey, I spoke to this guy, he said he'd buy 100 units if we ...". Out of interest, I've recently discovered the Sumatra PDF viewer: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html It's open source, for Windows and faster than Foxit, the reader usually mentioned as an alternative in this situation.

The startup speed for this app is really good. From my quick testing it seems like it is as fast or slightly faster than npp. I am surprised that QT can be that fast. I recall this line from the Sumatra PDF developer on why he chose win32 only: >The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk. >The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works.[0] To be fair, a PDF reader and a notepad editor are two different things, and startup speed is only one metric which is the only one I tested. But I always assumed npp was also using win32 APIs only for similar reasons. (I don't actualy know what GUI toolkit npp uses.) And "bloated" could perhaps mean a lot of things. Perhaps QT takes more memory or something. But I always assumed npp's unbeatable speed was due to native APIs. [0] https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/l…

I think Conan and Modules will make c++ more popular in the future. It is a behemoth of a language. Very hard to master and it is still too easy to produce difficult to debug errors. So it will be very important, that the language changes to address these. But in working with c++ day to day I feel the most annoying things are indeed dealing with dependencies and headers. It can be a pain to set up a complex c++ project on a new machine. Even with Conan it can still be a pain because configuration management is a mess in c++. As for headers I can’t wait to see them rot in hell. Some people say that they can help you reason about your Program, but this is a very small positive point. Too many times I had problems with includes which only worked because a Translation Unit included some other header beforehand. I once read a blogpost of the developer of SumatraPDF where they describe that they never include anything directly[1]. This can be an improvement for compile time. But if someone else is working on your code or has to refactor it, it can be impossible to read yourself into it or track any compile time error. If one would only use modules these errors would simply not exist. [1]https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/96a4706ec8e44bc4b0bafda2d9ba502f/e…

Users do notice speed issues in apps and websites. The NNGroup has done studies with users to gather reactions to slow websites in 1997 and 2010. They remain relevant in 2021 to both apps and websites: "Users really care about speed in interaction design" [1] A few weeks ago someone on HN shared the reflections of the developer of SumatraPDF - a native Windows PDF reader that is small, lightweight and performant (all the things that Adobe Acrobat Reader is not). From the developer Krzysztof Kowalczyk: "I believe being small and seemingly fast was a big reason for adoption...there will never be a time when users want bloated and slow apps, so being small and fast is a permanent advantage." [2] [1] Website Response Times (2010): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/ [2] Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF : https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/l…

Not only that, being so adamant about using Arch Linux would make you look ignorant/partisan. Now don't get me wrong, I'm more likely that most to make a stink about not being able to use Linux on the job, but you can still get most of the important tools on a Windows box: Unix utilities (cygwin), nice tabbed terminal (Console2), GVim, Emacs, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. One tool I lean on heavily is the Silver Searcher (granted, you could could install Perl/App::Ack) and I was able to even quickly find a Windows port of that just now: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/the-silver-searcher-for-windows.h… Given the availability of most of the good stuff on Windows, I don't think my workflow would change very much if I were forced onto a Windows box right now, apart from the occasional bummer about some bleeding edge software being unported or some library assuming Mac/Linux. Indeed, it was being forced to work on a Windows machine for a couple years that made me switch from TextMate to Vim (it made sense to become proficient with a single cross-platform editor).