zathura is a good document viewer

i recommend it for viewing documents

2024-10-21

I started using zathura on my macbook because I was doing a lot of writing where my workflow included editing source (groff) files to create pdfs, and I wanted a pdf viewer that would auto-update on write so I could easily preview my changes without having to change window focus or reload the document. (zathura does this, and it’s great.) And I liked it so much now I use it everywhere I can install it.

It is plugin-based software. So you need to install a pdf plugin to actually use it. But that means it can support any other filetype for which there is a plugin. For example, I use a .cbz plugin on my handheld device to read comic books.

It is great for reading pdfs and comics because it has lots of keyboard shortcuts for quickly navigating and resizing pages.

One of its killer features, and I don’t know why every pdf viewer doesn’t do this, is inverting the document colors with a keystroke so that plain black text on a white background becomes plain white text on a black background. Now I can flip back and forth between a dark terminal and a pdf in low light without blinding myself, or read pdfs comfortably in bed in the dark.