When comparing Atril vs Zathura, 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 Zathura is ranked 3rd. 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 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.
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.
Cons
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.
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.