Zathura
A PDF reader driven entirely from the keyboard, with Vim bindings and a colour inversion that saves your eyes at night.
A PDF viewer with a toolbar, a sidebar, and a ribbon is optimised for someone filling in a form. If you mostly read — papers, specs, manuals — the interface is in the way, and every navigation is a trip to the mouse.
Zathura shows the document and nothing else. It’s driven from the keyboard with Vim bindings, starts instantly, and one keystroke inverts the colours for reading at night.
Install
sudo apt install zathura zathura-pdf-mupdf
sudo dnf install zathura zathura-pdf-mupdf
sudo pacman -S zathura zathura-pdf-mupdf
The viewer itself renders nothing — support comes from plugins. Pick one PDF backend:
zathura-pdf-mupdf (better font rendering, lighter on large files, the usual
recommendation) or zathura-pdf-poppler. Installing both is the classic mistake — which
one gets used is then unpredictable. There are separate plugins for DjVu, PostScript, and
EPUB.
Read something
zathura paper.pdf
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
j / k | Scroll down / up |
d / u | Half page down / up |
J / K | Next / previous page |
gg / G | First / last page |
5G | Go to page 5 |
/text then n / N | Search, next, previous match |
Tab | Table of contents; navigate and Enter to jump |
a / s | Fit page / fit width |
+ / - | Zoom |
r | Rotate |
Ctrl+r | Invert colours |
f | Show link hints — press the number to follow a link |
o | Open another file without leaving |
If you use Vim, you already know most of this. Ctrl+r is the one to remember: white
pages at midnight become a dark document, and the setting can be made the default.
A config worth having
~/.config/zathura/zathurarc:
set recolor true # start in dark mode
set recolor-lightcolor "#1e1e2e"
set recolor-darkcolor "#cdd6f4"
set recolor-keephue true # keep figures recognisable
set recolor-reverse-video true # don't invert images and diagrams
set selection-clipboard clipboard # yanked text goes to the normal clipboard
set adjust-open width
set statusbar-home-tilde true
set scroll-step 80
map <C-i> zoom in
map <C-o> zoom out
map r reload
recolor-reverse-video is the line that makes dark mode usable for technical documents —
without it, every diagram and photograph is inverted too.
Where it fits
| Want | Use |
|---|---|
| Read a document, quickly, from the keyboard | Zathura |
| Annotate, fill forms, sign, edit | Okular, or a full PDF editor |
| Follow references while reading papers | Sioyek — same spirit, built for research |
| Merge, split, extract, or OCR | The command line — qpdf, pdftk, ocrmypdf |
It pairs naturally with a LaTeX or Typst workflow: Zathura reloads on file change, so the rendered document updates as you write, and SyncTeX support jumps between source line and page.
Next
With the desktop sorted, on to writing things down → Docs & Notes
Last updated 25 Aug 2026, 00:00 UTC.