that plus the quick look from smashing the space bar in Finder. selecting a file and hitting space is muscle memory for me, and the first time I do it on a non-macOS computer it just feels broken to me.
To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either.
I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.
The reason Preview works so well is because deep inside Apple's Quartz libraries used to render, rasterize and composite graphics such as windows, docs and images is a version of "Display PDF". Basically, PDF is a native macOS protocol.
The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
It was never an integral part of the windowing system of either operating system. That idea never panned out. Quartz's drawing functions included what was needed for postscript, but the UI was done solely with bitmaps and cached bitmaps. There's PDF APIs in there, but they're not anything special, like being super fast, efficient, or hardware-accelerated.
Preview is genuinely very good, but it doesn’t handle annotations made in Acrobat very well. When navigating between annotations, they can become stuck open in Preview, and it is not possible to view insertions.
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
Yeah, I've been very happy with it over the years. But my one minor nit-pick is that it uses a _lot_ of memory. I presume it is pre-rendering stuff for speed.
Interesting. I personally never liked Preview. No way to configure it to open maximized, so every time I open a Preview window, I have to maximize it manually.
Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Preview" to activate
tell application "System Events" to set value of attribute "AXFullScreen" of front window of (first process whose frontmost is true) to true
return input
end run
Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.
Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!