I Hate PDFs is a small native macOS PDF reader for local reading, highlighting, commenting, and review. It uses SwiftUI, AppKit, and PDFKit, keeps documents on your Mac, and avoids accounts, tracking, and cloud upload.

I Hate PDFs default reading mode.

What It Does

  • Opens local PDFs without accounts, analytics, tracking, or cloud upload.
  • Supports highlighting, comments, replies, bookmarks, search, and sidebars.
  • Writes standards-compatible annotations back into PDFs.
  • Stays intentionally small by relying on system frameworks.
  • Ships as a direct-download macOS app, with App Store packaging support.

Technical Shape

The project is a Swift Package with a core PDF annotation target and a SwiftUI macOS app target. The app uses PDFKit for rendering and annotation behavior, AppKit bridges where needed, and strict release-size checks to keep the bundle small.

The design rule is simple: stay native, local, and small unless a feature clearly justifies its weight.

Status

I Hate PDFs is in open beta and actively maintained. The current public release line focuses on fast local PDF review, standards-compatible annotations, and small distribution artifacts.