I don't see how you'll enjoy Vim without a preference for (fast and efficient) keybindings, but this is certainly possible, if somewhat odd. Usually, one defines keybindings for custom commands (so the other way around), in order to speed up frequently used commands. See more results. Xcode 4 does allow you to take advantage of all the new Lion features at the expense of native vi/vim key commands. Mac text entry is more emacs like than vi like, but there are plenty of good articles that explain how to customize the key bindings to make Xcode more vi like.

Additionally pdf-tools has wonderful search facilities (through pdf-occur). Combined with Auctex it also forms the best latex editing environment. With spacemacs, pdf-tools is easily installed and configured. As it is emacs, the reader is ultimately configurable and hackable. The minimal initial setup time is worth the effort. I am a minimalist with an addiction to vim keybindings. If this new PDF reader were to have such feature and a minimalist GUI, I would be very willing to consider it as a replacement to Sumatra. (If it could be like Vimperator it would be awesome, but I know that is too far-fetched.) However it may be, I wish you luck and a happy new year.

I use zathura, because it fits perfectly into awesome wm - no unnecessary borders, tabs and so on. The second - and probably the most important - feature is its auto-refresh.
As I work primarily with LaTeX, a pdf viewer without auto refresh is much less usable.

This is what I used to think, but I've changed my mind. If you have xdotool installed, you can have your LaTeX compilation script call...

... if it is successful in compiling. That sends the 'r' key as input to MuPDF, which refreshes it. That's (IMHO) better than an auto-refresh, and never tries to update when it shouldn't.

In fact, I now have gvim set up with an autocmd to save, compile LaTeX and update MuPDF in such a way that the preview live-updates as I type. It emulates gummi, but with an editor that doesn't suck. I tried to make this work with Zathura, but if a compilation failed, Zathura would get stuck because of the corrupted PDF and stop auto-updating. But with the above, MuPDF only refreshes when the compilation was successful, so it never tries to load a corrupted PDF.

(It sorta works with Evince's autoupdate, since it doesn't get 'stuck' the way Zathura does, but it goes much slower, since it's a much heavier program than MuPDF.) MuPDF is the only thing fast enough to 'almost' keep up with the source screen.

Last edited by frabjous (2010-10-20 21:14:22)

Thanks, I guess I will be using the binary look approach from now on.

iBertus:
Yes I'm picky. I'm very easily annoyed by irritating things when it comes to applications. So I'm striving for perfection.

apaige:
Bloted or not. When it comes to rendering pages, Acreread does it twice as fast as Xpdf. Xpdf start faster thou.

I did a simple test on startup time and jumping from page 1 -> 2 on a document. This is not very scientific, since there is a lot of variables. Had a few things running in the background.

The startuptest is done by loading the pdfreader with a pdf file from a terminal. It was no restart of the computer between the different readers, so the last ones might benefit from already loaded dependencies.

Jump from one page to the next is done with the reader in fullscreen and with the pdf page fit height. I did this mainly from page one to two. But the three last use preloading of the pages, so I had to jump fast down until I came down to a page that was not preloaded.

Here is the file used.

The result.

xpdf, startup: 6.4 sec, load page 1 -> 2: 4.0 sec
acroread, startup: 11.5 sec, load page 1 -> 2: 1.8 sec
epdefview, startup: 26.7 sec, load page: 2.2 sec
okular, startup: 13.5 sec, load page: 1.3 sec
evince, startup: 17.9 sec, load page: 1.1 sec

So, both Okular and Evince are very good readers. The only problem is the KDE/Gnome dependencies making them both slow starters. The second start will be fast since things already have been loaded. So one of them will be my preferred reader for now.

Zathura: PDF Viewer For VIM Lovers - Pearls In Life

Vim To The Rescue: PDF Preview - DEV Community

Last edited by orjanp (2008-11-11 14:36:51)