---
title: Why I Use Skim
tags: [Skim, Reading]
summary: The advantages of this wonderful PDF reader form OSX.
---


In the last several posts, I have been talking about a program
called [Skim].  This is the only program I use to read on my
desktop, and seeing as how I spend many hours a day reading, I have
invested some time in getting the tools right.  Skim possesses a
huge advantage over its competitors for two main reasons: (i) it is
free and open source and (ii) it is designed and used by academics,
so it provides features tailored to the needs of the serious
researcher.  When you first download and launch it, Skim appears
cluttered with (in my opinion) terribly ugly toolbar icons.
Fortunately, you can turn off all the chrome and use keyboard
shortcuts to access the important features.  When I work with it,
Skim looks like this:

![Screen Shot of Skim in Use](/images/Screen2014-07-051.png)


I use [Moom] to set Skim's default window to precisely two-thirds
of my MacBook Air's screen and the anchored text note to the
remaining third.  I use [Shadow Killer] to remove (you guessed it)
the shadows between these two windows.

I like to keep short notes as *text* notes so that I can read them
quickly while reviewing the text.  I like to use *anchored* notes
for longer comments, pulling important quotes, and outlining a
chapter.  I will talk about the way that I retrieve all these notes
in a latter post.  For now, I just want to point out the incredible
ease with which Skim handles a wide variety of note types.  I
personally use highlights, text notes, and anchored notes, but you
can find all sorts of other options if those fit your needs.  When
working with Preview or Acrobat, working with annotations is a pain
and reading through them is even more of a pain, but Skim makes
this entire process easy.

Add to these features that Skim is *fast*.  Not only does it open
extremely quickly (unlike every Adobe product), it also scrolls
rapidly through 500+ page scanned PDFs without choking.  As you can
see in the previous posts, Skim is also highly customizable via
AppleScript.  All in all, this makes Skim the best-in-class PDF
reader for the power-user digital humanist.

[Shadow Killer]: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6428/shadowkiller-x
[Skim]: http ://skim-app.sourceforge.net [Moom]: http://manytricks.com/moom/