Skim is a pdf document reader and bookmark.
For those of us who look at it from the outside, the Apple world is a mystery. Its hardware is more expensive than that of a pc, and not all of its components are standard. Not to mention that their user licenses are reminiscent of vassalage contracts. However, it has fans, and many of them also love open source. That is why, in In this post we discuss three exclusive open source applications for Mac.
I want to clarify that I am sure that if you gave me the budget, you would probably also be one of those fans who use open source programs on Mac. In case your hardware turns out as good as they say, I would definitely want to use it with some of my programs preferred.
In general, lThe main open source projects have their version for Mac. Thus, we can navigate with Firefox, play multimedia files with VLC, perform office tasks with LibreOffice, or manage bibliographic collections with Caliber.
There are also programs that are exclusive to Mac, for example these:
IINA media player
If you used Linux for a long time, you surely know Mplayer, a player built for the command line. Mplayer had a fork called Mplayer2. From the almost complete union of the best characteristics of the two was born MPV. In Linux we have some MPV-based players with a graphical interface; GNOME-MPV and BOMI are two of them.
IINA is an MPV-based audio and video player for Mac. It has a minimalist but modern design.
IINA Features
- Support for Force Touch, the touch bar and the picture-in-picture function.
- When you open a video, it automatically adds other videos in that folder to a playlist.
- If you are listening to an audiobook or podcast, IINA allows you to quickly navigate between MP3 chapters.
- The interface includes buttons for playlists, music mode, picture in picture, and settings.
- Different themes for the user interface.
- Automatic download of subtitles. Requires Opensubtitles account
- Various settings for audio and video settings.
- You can change the appearance of the subtitles.
- Customization of keyboard shortcuts.
Skim document reader and annotator
Although the application for viewing images and documents built into the Mac operating system has good support for pdf documents, we may need to Skim for more complex jobs.
Skim is a PDF reader for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific articles in PDF, but it is also ideal for viewing any other type of files.
Skim Features
- See all kinds of pdf documents.
- Add and edit notes.
- One-touch highlighting of important text.
- Easy reference creation using snapshots.
- Navigation through table of contents and page thumbnails.
- See all notes.
- Full screen reading.
- Zoom of the document view.
- Support for AppleScript.
- Tool for clipping.
- Support for LaTeX, SyncTeX and PDFSync ..
Skim includes a feature called the reading bar to help you focus. And the content pane has a powerful built-in search function: it highlights the search term on relevant pages and groups them by density and sheet.
Plain text editor CotEditor
CotEditor is a lightweight text and code editor. It has a clean and simple interface that allows you to quickly change line endings, file encoding, and syntax coloring. It supports almost 60 programming languages, so you can choose the color of the syntax as needed.
The integrated side panel allows you to view detailed information about the file we are working with, including text encoding, character count, and much more. It has excellent regular expression support and a powerful text search tool, similar to that of paid applications.
It is possible to divide the window into two halves, so that we can keep one half of the window for reference while making modifications to the other.
Finally, why don't you tell us about your experience using Linux and open source applications on Mac?