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.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    It’s the same reason I like TUI utilities like tiv, the terminal image viewer.

    Sometimes I don’t want to have my workflow broken just to quickly check the contents or layout of what the file contains, I just need to glance at it and continue with what I’m doing.