xterm vs Zathura

Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.

If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution.

Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators.

Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters.

See this.

Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it.

X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons

Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.

Inferface is clean and shows only a small statusbar.

You can browse files via keyboard, using keyboard commands similar to vim (text editor).

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).

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

• recolor-darkcolor
• recolor-lightcolor
• recolor-keephue
• recolor-reverse-video
  (see manpage zathurarc)
  Also, proper dark mode: colors are grayscaled not inverted.

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.

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

See man page "zathura".

https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
But unlike qpdfview search will only operate on one tab instance.