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Hi there, is there a way to add sessions to sumatra. Usually have a cluster of docs that I have to work through and this would save time instead of opening specific pdfs, closing them and opening the next batch.

@tam
variable “Sessions” are not a current native feature, HOWEVER

There are two ways to emulate your requirements (the second may be more suited to YOUR needs)

1. During forum discussions on how to guard against loss of “restore session” settings during power failure etc. my recommendation was to manually save your last known good settings file, the same technique can be adapted for “groups” of .pdf etc.

SO, first save a “default” copy of SumatraPDF-settings.txt as say “default.txt”
set up first session as you like it and save the SumatraPDF-settings.txt file as say “MyComics.txt”
set up another session e.g. “MyUtilityBills” and save the settings file accordingly

Now depending on your skill at replacing the settings file (e.g. by use of scripts) you need to first overwrite the settings file then call SumatraPDF.exe
for a group of preferred files you can edit the contents of a settings file with notepad and add a sessions worth of filename/paths in bulk however as its slightly tricky you need to read other forum notes such as Windows update reboots

2. possibly simpler for managing alternative groups of settings
   There is an un documented command line feature that can be used to set up alternative settings files

to test this first make two empty folders on your desktop, name them one and two
copy 2 separate shortcuts for SumatraPDF and edit them to point to those empty folders e.g.

“C:\your path to\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe” -appdata “C:\Users\ your name goes here\Desktop\One”

“C:\your path to\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe” -appdata “C:\Users\ your name goes here\Desktop\Two”

when you click on the shortcuts SumatraPDF will run each as a separate session

once you know how they work you can move/rename them whatever you like

You can develop this solution further by pointing the shortcut start in dir and “appdata” entry to an existing grouped files folder i.e. keeping the .pdf (or .epub etc) in the same directory as the session sumatrapdf-settings.txt file.
Optionally keep the shortcuts on your desktop or a single index folder or in each group folder
Remember you don’t need to open files one at a time just select all the docs in the group and drop them on the relevant shortcut

The “Pro” is you can change colours, user interface, fonts etc. per session file
The “Con” if you want to change a global value for all sessions you need to edit or replace all the session SumatraPDF-settings.txt files and reload (drag and drop) all the docs for that session

NOTE the above method will tend to restrict you to “single sessions” using the single .exe
(it is possible to change the behaviour to have many “sessions” open) however it is best practice to close one prior to opening the next, that way there are less likely to be issues especially if many sessions close unexpectedly