When comparing Zathura vs MPlayer, the Slant community recommends Zathura for most people. In the question“What are the best applications to use on a X11 window manager?” Zathura is ranked 5th while MPlayer is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Zathura is:
Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.
Pro Clean interface
Inferface is clean and shows only a small statusbar.
Pro Vim bindings
You can browse files via keyboard, using keyboard commands similar to vim (text editor).
Pro Automatic document reloading
Zathura will automatically refresh the view when a document has been modified. (By contrast, Chrome requires a manual refresh and brings you back to the top of the document so that you have to scroll back down).
Pro Default page layout always same and predictable
No unpredictable window opening behavior like Atril. Together with it's easy ways to scroll and zoom, zathura is perfect for fast look through lots of PDFs
Pro Detailed adjustment of dark mode
- recolor-darkcolor
- recolor-lightcolor
- recolor-keephue
- recolor-reverse-video
(see manpage zathurarc)
Also, proper dark mode: colors are grayscaled not inverted.
Pro Deactivation of all GUI elements
Pro Very detailed adjustment of page layout
For example:
- pages-per-row 3 (3 pages next to each other)
- first-page-column 3:1 (for 3 page column layout: first page is on the left)
- page-right-to-left false (2nd and 3rd page are shown right to the 1st)
Unfortunately I haven't found a way yet to map these commands to a key. The ability to prefix a shortcut with a number argument would lend itself perfectly to achieve what I had in mind.
Pro Call userscripts on document
For example:
map <C-l> exec "termite -c ./termite_config --class float -e 'tmux new-session /bin/ranger $(dirname "%")'"
<C-l> opens ranger with directory containing the opened document
Other ideas:
- extract pages
- print pages
Pro Good documentation of configuration options
See man page "zathura".
Pro Multiple tabs via tabbed
https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
But unlike qpdfview search will only operate on one tab instance.
Pro Needs no additional codecs
Everything MPlayer needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed.
Pro Easy shortcut keys
Quick skip ahead buttons and other shortcut keys.
Pro No bugs , no lag in the video display
Pro Works via CLI and has multiple frontends to choose from
Some of the more popular frontends include Deepin Media Player, GNOME MPlayer, KPlayer, KMPlayer, Rosa Media Player, SMPlayer and Xt7-Player.
Pro Nice theme available to choose from
Also, the video window is separate from the main window making it less cluttered while playing audio
Cons
Con No annotation support
Con No thumbnail view
Unlike qpdfview, okular and evince, which have it.
Con Input forms are not editable
qpdfview, okular and evince do this.