Opening PDF in external viewer completely freezes Joplin application

Features
1

Hello,

I need to open PDFs in an external viewer and cannot rely on the integrated Joplin PDF viewer due to various reasons.

Now when I click a note PDF attachment, the external viewer opens, but it freezes the whole application until PDF gets closed again.

Blocking is also default behavior for xdg-open (Linux), but suboptimal in context of Joplin, when further notes are to be explored, while the PDF is still open. Besides, user experience is rather "surprising" and feels like an app crash.

Is this intended behaviour?

My proposal is to start the external application in a separate thread in a non-GUI-blocking fashion.
What do you think?

OS: Debian
Joplin 2.8.8

2

What DE/WM are you using and what application to view the PDF?. It doesn't happen for me on Fedora 36 GNOME opening in Evince/"Document Viewer".

Does it happen with any other resource you open in an external application?

1 Like
3

Yes, indeed Evince alone does work. Without too much details: I am using a blocking wrapper around Evince (GNOME), which seems to be the culprit. The wrapper also blocks with xdg-open.

Strange, I could swear, it worked before in previous versions. But let me try some workaround first. Thanks for the hint so far!