This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
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Hermes PDF Reader
Open. Read. Nothing else.
All I wanted to do was open a file. Instead, I had to login to Adobe, close the hideous sidebar, close the AI agent panel, and then read my doc. Why should I? So I built Hermes PDF, the no-nonsense messenger god of PDF readers. Built on Tauri instead of Electron to reduce bloat. 14MB, that's all you've always needed. Open a file, read it. That's it. That's the app.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I built Hermes PDF after one too many PDF readers made me log in, sit through a sidebar full of features I didn't ask for, or wait several seconds just to see a page render. I wanted something that opened a file and got out of the way. So I built it.
It's a native desktop app (Tauri + Rust + TypeScript), currently free and open source. A few things it does well: multi-tab reading (up to 20 files at once, each with its own zoom/scroll state), smooth continuous scrolling, real OS-level file association (not just "Open with" buried in a submenu), and signed auto-updates that don't nag you.
It's deliberately not trying to be Acrobat — no annotations, no cloud sync, no AI panel, no editing suite. Just a fast, dark-by-default reader for people who read a lot of PDFs and want the tool to disappear.
Still early (v0.1.5, pre-1.0) — I'd genuinely love feedback, bug reports, or "please add X" requests. The repo's linked above if you want to poke around the code or file an issue directly.
This is my first launch so play nice, thanks for checking it out! 🪽
About Hermes PDF Reader on Product Hunt
“Open. Read. Nothing else.”
Hermes PDF Reader was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 10 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #138 on the daily leaderboard. All I wanted to do was open a file. Instead, I had to login to Adobe, close the hideous sidebar, close the AI agent panel, and then read my doc. Why should I? So I built Hermes PDF, the no-nonsense messenger god of PDF readers. Built on Tauri instead of Electron to reduce bloat. 14MB, that's all you've always needed. Open a file, read it. That's it. That's the app.
On the analytics side, Hermes PDF Reader competes within Productivity, Open Source, Developer Tools and GitHub — topics that collectively have 1.3M followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Hermes PDF Reader performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Hermes PDF Reader?
Hermes PDF Reader was hunted by Lalith Kishore. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Hermes PDF Reader including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Lalith Kishore
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I built Hermes PDF after one too many PDF readers made me log in, sit through a sidebar full of features I didn't ask for, or wait several seconds just to see a page render. I wanted something that opened a file and got out of the way. So I built it.
It's a native desktop app (Tauri + Rust + TypeScript), currently free and open source. A few things it does well: multi-tab reading (up to 20 files at once, each with its own zoom/scroll state), smooth continuous scrolling, real OS-level file association (not just "Open with" buried in a submenu), and signed auto-updates that don't nag you.
It's deliberately not trying to be Acrobat — no annotations, no cloud sync, no AI panel, no editing suite. Just a fast, dark-by-default reader for people who read a lot of PDFs and want the tool to disappear.
Still early (v0.1.5, pre-1.0) — I'd genuinely love feedback, bug reports, or "please add X" requests. The repo's linked above if you want to poke around the code or file an issue directly.
This is my first launch so play nice, thanks for checking it out! 🪽