How to find out what program ranger is using to preview a file

ranger

I am using the ranger terminal based file manager to navigate and view files.
When I navigate to a folder which contains pdf files, and position the cursor on a PDF file ranger reads the file and then displays it in its preview pane .

enter image description here

My understanding is that the ranger program delegates to "rifle" the tasks of

  • recognising what type of file it is – in this case PDF
  • launching a program which handles that filetype
  • instructing the program to load the file currently under the cursor

I now want to open the file being previewed in the text based program that is rendering the preview in the above image. However when I press l to launch ranger/rifle uses "evince", a GUI program.
Looking in

file: ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf

#-------------------------------------------
# Documents
#-------------------------------------------
ext pdf, has llpp,     X, flag f = llpp "$@"
ext pdf, has zathura,  X, flag f = zathura -- "$@"
ext pdf, has mupdf,    X, flag f = mupdf -- "$@"
ext pdf, has apvlv,    X, flag f = apvlv -- "$@"
ext pdf, has xpdf,     X, flag f = xpdf -- "$@"
ext pdf, has evince,   X, flag f = evince -- "$@"
ext pdf, has atril,    X, flag f = atril -- "$@"
ext pdf, has okular,   X, flag f = okular -- "$@"
ext pdf, has epdfview, X, flag f = epdfview -- "$@"
ext pdf, has qpdfview, X, flag f = qpdfview "$@"

This configuration indicates that evince will be used when a file is "opened" but what program is being used to generate the preview?

  • I am using Ubuntu 16.04

Best Answer

According to the webpage, it uses pdftotext for pdf previews. (You could read the source code to be certain).

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