I have been looking for a PDF viewer on Linux platform that is lightweight, keyboard driven. Evince was once my favorite, until I met Zathura.
Highlights
Here a few features of Zathura that I really appreciate:
- Keyboard Driven: the keyboard shortcuts are very similar to Vim. A Vim user will immediately feel at home when using Zathura.
- Minimal Design: but has almost all features you would expect from any decent PDF viewers. In particular, automatically reload the file if changes are detected. This comes handy together with the continuous preview mode of Latexmk.
- Customizibility: similar to Vim, there is a zathurarc which you can use to customize Zathura.
Installation
Use this command to install Zathura and set it to default PDF viewer.
1 2 3 | $ sudo apt-get install zathura
$ mimeopen -d *.pdf
# choose Zathura
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Basic Usage
As I mentioned before, Zathura use almost the exact key mapping as Vim. For example, j, k, h, l for navigation, gg, GG to go to the first or last page, and J, K for next and previous page. These are pretty much all you need for basic PDF viewing.
In particular, TAB will show the table of content. For more keyboard shortcuts, checkout the manual.
Configuration
You can configure Zathura using $HOME/.config/zathura/zathurarc. Here is my zathurarc.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | # zoom and scroll step size
set zoom-step 20
set scroll-step 80
# copy selection to system clipboard
set selection-clipboard clipboard
# enable incremental search
set incremental-search true
# zoom
map <C-i> zoom in
map <C-o> zoom out
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