I'm using GNU/Guix as my operating system and have had pdf-tools installed for several years. During that time whenever I opened a PDF file (e.g. by clicking on an org-mode link or selecting one with find-files). Lately it has stopped automatically associating itself with PDF files. Instead I get an low resolution Docview-mode buffer instead and I have to manually change it to pdf-tools, which otherwise works once it's turned on. I'm guessing something changed upstream which prevents it from working like it did before. I'm wondering whether there is some elisp I can add to my configuration to force the issue so I don't have to manually change the mode and enable the special isearch minor mode manually?
1 Answer
Look for an entry like this in your auto-mode-alist:
...
("\\.[pP][dD][fF]\\'" . pdf-view-mode)
...
If you don't find it, then add something like this to your init file:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.[pP][dD][fF]\\'" . pdf-view-mode))
This will add it to the front of the list, so even if there is another entry later on associating PDF files with doc-view-mode-maybe, the pdf-view-mode entry will win.
org-pdfviewpackage, but I did not see it the Guix repositories. Considering how Guix users feel about Emacs and how many of them are academics, surely I must be missing something.