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Add to SafariWhen comparing Zathura vs LilyTerm, 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 LilyTerm is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Zathura is:
Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.
Specs
Question 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 Support for tabbing
You can also color and reorder tabs, as well as manipulate tabs through keybindings.
Pro Transparency support improves usability
LilyTerm has true transparency support, making for better GUI usability.
Pro Change encoding on-the-fly
LilyTerm can change encoding on-the-fly. UTF-8 is the default encoding.
Pro Lightweight
LilyTerm is a terminal emulator that aims to be as lightweight as possible. It requires minimal system resources and has very few dependencies.
Pro Fullscreen support
LilyTerm has fullscreen support which improves visibility.
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.
Con Annoying behaviors
The default configuration may have some annoying behaviors (that can be removed by changing the default config). Such include asking for confirmation when reusing an existing window or when starting the terminal to launch a specific command.
