When comparing MuPDF vs Atril, the Slant community recommends Atril for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” Atril is ranked 2nd while MuPDF is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Atril is:
It is a straight port of the GNOME2 Evince to GTK3 without sacrificing its UI like Evince 3 did. It also has all the cool stuff that professional apps need, like: Menubars, editable Toolbars, Menus with Icons, Menus with keyboard shortcuts.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Super fast
It was written in C and opengl, so your hardware was used fully.
Pro Vim-mode shortcut keys
Super easy to use with rapid response.
Pro Excellent for presentations
Pro Annotation capability
With mupdf-gl, you can do most of the annotations and comments.
Pro No GNOME3
It is a straight port of the GNOME2 Evince to GTK3 without sacrificing its UI like Evince 3 did. It also has all the cool stuff that professional apps need, like: Menubars, editable Toolbars, Menus with Icons, Menus with keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Great Evince fork
It has been forked when Evince was still good.
Cons
Con No print option
Con No two page mode
Con Not enough functionality
If you want "minimal," you got it.
Con The annotation does not have good shortcut key support
Con Cannot customize shortcut keys
Con Disappointing search
In comparison with its origin, Evince, the search results in Atril is disappointing. You can search, but only locates your search term per page, the one you're located on. Want to find it elsewhere? Search all pages one by one, page by page. Hence, I personally, working/ searching in large pdfs, therefore prefer Evince, which does give you the search result for the whole document. Apart from this, Atril seems a great piece of (fork) work.
Con Some GTK dependecy
It needs GTK+ and its dependencies.