I’ve been using Firefox to view PDFs and it works fine. Recently though I wanted to try something more minimal with vim keybindings. Found two options: Zathura and tdf (terminal pdf viewer).

What I’m curious about is why someone would choose a TUI pdf viewer over a regular one (like Zathura). What are the actual advantages people find in practice. tdf mentions being fast but I wonder if that’s something you’d actually notice day to day?

Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ? Maybe someone uses one here?

Tdf seems relatively popular with 1.4k github stars.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    3·
    10 hours ago

    Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

    Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.