# 100 Days to Offload 2025

Desperately Seeking Preview.app

Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org[a][b]

Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org

In yesterday’s[a] 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.

[a]

Looking over blog post ideas note today, I realized that I missed a major one: Preview.app[a]. 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[b]), 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!!! 💩)

[a]

[b]

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[a] programs). There are some really nice and fairly fully-featured PDF viewers like Okular and Evince, some very nice minialist viewers like Zathura[b], and some really excellent markup/editing utilities, but there are none that do it all, like Preview.app did.

[a]

[b]

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: