Zathura: A minimalist document viewer that uses the keyboard

The document viewer on distributions such as Ubuntu is generally Evince in GNOME (LCTT translation annotation: pronounced /ɪˈvɪns/). Evince supports a variety of file formats, which is very convenient.

But besides Evince, there are many other document reading applications. For example, the excellent e-book reading application on Linux Foliate (LCTT translation annotation: pronounced /ˈfəʊlɪɪt/).

Recently I discovered another document viewer: Zathura.

Get a mouse-free reading experience with Zathura

Zathura is a highly customizable document viewer based on the girara user interface and several Document library. girara implements a simple, minimal user interface.

Zathura loads extremely fast. It is extremely simple and has no sidebar, menu bar and other elements. (LCTT Translation: In fact, Zathura’s interface is not that simple. Press the Tab key to display the index page; Zathura has a guioptions option to set whether to display the command line, status bar, and horizontal scroll bar. , vertical scroll bars and other GUI elements.)

Zathura Document Viewer Interface

Press the : key You can open Zathura's command line prompt and press the Esc key to exit the command line.

If you want to create a new bookmark, you can enter :bmark followed by the index number you want to set for this bookmark.

Bookmarks in Zathura

Press the F key to highlight all links, each link comes with a serial number, and a command line prompt will be displayed at the bottom of the interface. Enter the serial number corresponding to the link in the command line and press Enter to open the link with the system's default browser.

Highlight and open links in documents

Zathura also supports automatic reloading. If the file is modified by another application (LCTT annotation: for example, after modifying the LaTeX source file and recompiling to get a new PDF), Zathura will automatically reload the modified file.

You can also install plug-ins to extend the functions of Zathura, such as reading comics

But Zathura has a problem, there is no documentation or help options on its interface, It will be a little difficult to use it for the first time.

You can get the default keyboard shortcut information from Zathura's man page. Here are some of them:

• R: Rotate
• D: Switch between single and double page viewing modes
• F: Highlight the link in the current screen
• H J K L: Use Vim type keys to move (LCTT Translation annotation: HJKL stands for left, bottom, top and right respectively)
• ↑ ↓ ← → key or PgUp/PgDown or mouse/touchpad: move up and down
• /: search text, press n or N Move to next or previous search (similar to less command)
• Q: Close

Zathura The project website provides documents on how to configure the software, but I feel that the writing is not very clear. (LCTT Translation: After installing Zathura, you can use man zathurarc to view the local Zathura configuration manual.)

Installing Zathura on Linux

Software for most Linux distributions Zathura is included in repositories, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and Debian (find from pkgs.org website). You can install it using the package manager or software center on your distribution.

You can use the following command to install Zathura on Debian and Ubuntu distributions:

sudo apt install zathura

You can use it on Fedora:

sudo dnf install zathura

Use it on Arch Linux pacman install Zathura:

sudo pacman -Sy zathura

If you want to view the source code of Zathura, you can visit its software repository on GitLab:

Zathura Source Code

Summary

To be honest, I don’t like tools that don’t use a mouse, so I prefer Nano to Vim because I can’t remember the countless shortcut keys on Vim. (LCTT Translation: In fact, Zathura has some support for the mouse. Click the left mouse button to open the link, hold down the left mouse button to select and copy text, and hold down the middle mouse button to drag the view, Ctrl Rolling the wheel can zoom the view.)

I know there are many people who firmly believe that the keyboard is more efficient than the mouse. But I'm not willing to specifically learn how to configure a document viewer, mainly because I rarely read large documents on my desktop, and when I occasionally need to view PDFs, the default app is sufficient.

Of course, I'm not saying that Zathura has no uses. If you need to process a lot of documents such as PDF or LaTeX and prefer keyboard operation, Zathura may become your next favorite tool.

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