Derek Taylor over at DistroTube has a nice introduction to reading PDFs and doing diffs from within Emacs. As Taylor says, almost all of us have standalone applications to do these things but even if you don’t belong to the Alles in Emacs camp, it’s nice to perform these tasks from within Emacs if you’re already there.
Taylor approaches the issues through his latest Emacs configuration so he discusses things like his custom keybindings that you probably won’t care about. But he does demonstrate both applications. For PDFs he uses the excellent pdf-tools package. He shows basic navigation and how to annotate PDFs. This is a great package that I use all the time. Unless a PDF comes up in my browser, it’s the only PDF reader I use.
He also demonstrates the builtin Ediff package. As I’ve written before, I’ve long had a difficult time with Ediff but Prot’s video cured me of that. Taylor’s video also helps demystify Ediff and show how easy to use if you ignore most of the fancy commands. The great thing about Ediff, of course, is that you can move any given difference from one file to the other.
It’s a nice video, especially if you’re interested in reading PDFs or performing diffs. The video is 18 minutes, 43 seconds long so you’ll have to schedule some time.
Update : Added link to video.