Home / Feature request: Single key to open next PDF in folder

Feature request: I would like SumatraPDF to work in a similar way to most graphics viewers, where you can hit, for example, the Space key to close the current file and instantly open the next file in a folder.

Is there a way to configure SumatraPDF to allow the Space key to (1) Close the current PDF, and (2) Open the next PDF in the same folder, with the default view settings? I find myself constantly hitting the space key and expecting the next PDF to open, because most of my folders consist of 50% PDF and 50% mixture of PNG and JPG.

At least the Esc key is consistent; I have SumatraPDF configured so that Esc closes the PDF, much in the same way that Esc closes PNG and JPG files in my various graphics viewers.

Thank you.

From manual

                       space   scroll by screen 
    <Ctrl> + <Shift> + Right   open next document in the directory 
    <Ctrl> + <Shift> + Left    open previous document in the directory 

there are no combined controls for tabs however if you use a single un-tabbed session the one file view window will close current and open next (or previous)

You can have different session start-ups so that one shortcut works single file at a time (as above) whilst a different start works with tabs etc.

See countless other requests to remap keys but short answer to re-assigning space bar is NO, you would need to use a 3rd party key mapper (at your own risk )

OpenBatchInFolder = true
NextInFolder = true
ShowNextButton = true
KeyMapping = true

BeRewardedWithUserAppreciation = true

|Ctrl||Shift||Right| solves my immediate problem. THX!

Like most people, I use Sumatra for PDF and IrfanView for bitmap files. Whenever I switch from Irfan to Sumatra, I can hardly believe that there is no way to switch to the next file in the folder with the mouse. The combination of next page / previous page of file and next file / previous file in the folder is essential for a free file viewer.

SumatraPDF has many hundreds of actions and the toolbar has always been kept for less than a dozen primarily for controlling the current file being read.

When you open a FOLDER of images (OR a zip archive) the left / right arrows will open previous/next file similar to Irfanview.

Goto file next and previous are often requested but not the most commonly needed
Those keyboard shortcuts are ranked similar priority as many others

CTRL+SHIFT+RIGHT

Super mega useful, happy to have found this shortcut! Many thanks!

Some years ago I used a PDF viewer (Brava Reader) that was quite simple but had a very unique feature: it was possible to open one PDF in a folder, and go to the previous or next PDF file in the same folder following an alphabetic order just with one keystroke (for the next PDF file it was “Space-bar” and for the previous one it was “Backspace”). The owner of that reader IP decided not to keep it free any longer a couple of years ago. The same owner had a DWG reader with the same function and it was really useful, but suffered the same fate.

This feature made it very simple to explore folders with a lot of PDF files and not very helpful filenames to find a particular document. It would be nice if you consider to add this feature to Sumatra.

It would also be nice if you could allow DWG files to be open with Sumatra.

Thanks.

I don’t think next and previous PDF is always expected alpha order but it should I think be natural order which should be near as damit close enough.

It will be ALL supported files in folder (not just the .pdf)

Also it will stumble IF there is an unsupported file such as a zip without images in the folder since it halts on the error message, without skipping the blocker. With latest Daily version TXT files are OK.

DWG is very unlikely to be supported but most CAD users (myself included) use SumatraPDF to read the PDF plots (Please ensure you chose line weights correctly Never Zer0 Thick or else you will complain they are so fine as to be almost invisible)

Thanks for replying. I didn’t know Sumatra had that option, it’s hidden. The sorting method is not really important, but it would be expected as you mention.

About DWG files, it would be very useful because DWG viewers tend to be large packages and sometimes not easy to handle. Line sizes, layers and that stuff is usually irrelevant, when you just need to visualize a DWG file in the fastest possible way. It would be just for that purpose.

Thanks again.

Which SumatraPDF is not. If we say added DOC and DocX and Powerpoint and Visio, CAD & XYZ we would need more than the one part time developer, who is almost keeping up with the current many types. so Plain.TXT was the easy recent option

Understood. It’s maybe the simplicity and quickness of SumatraPDF what invites everyone to wish lighter viewers for other formats, but adding support for more formats would make SumatraPDF a larger package and require more development time.

Thanks.

Adobe have over 20,000 paid employees , I don’t know how many are working on updating their PDF and other viewers but most get much bigger / slower / bloated with new features every time !