 One of the great things about Linux is that we do have a lot of really good PDF viewers on Linux. So if you're one of those people that do a lot of reading as far as on your desktop reading PDF documents, PDF books, or maybe you present PDF slideshows as part of presentations, I certainly do that on camera sometimes. As a matter of fact, that is why I'm doing today's video because I've been asked by people how I do my PDF slideshows. What PDF viewer am I using? Well, I use a PDF viewer called Zathura. Zathura is a really interesting PDF viewer because, well, for one thing, it's not just a PDF viewer. I should name it properly. It is a document viewer because it can view a wide variety of documents, not just PDFs. And in fact, when you install Zathura, one of the things you need to do, don't just install the Zathura package like on Arch Linux. If you just install Zathura and then you go to Open Zathura, it's not going to display any document because there are other packages that you need to install dependencies for Zathura to be able to view various document formats. If you want to view PDFs in Zathura, what you need to do is make sure that the popular libraries are installed. On most Linux distributions, they will already be there on the more minimal distributions like something like Arch Linux or Gen2. You need to install popular. What got me interested in Zathura as a PDF viewer was the fact that it is quite extensible. It actually has a config file. It's very similar to like a VMRC. So you can have a Zathura RC where you can set key bindings. You can set various options. A matter of fact, the language as far as, you know, how you configure the config file is very, very VIM-like. And Zathura is very VIM-like as far as key bindings. There's a lot of key bindings that are set out of the box. Unfortunately, the Zathura website here doesn't do a good job documenting the several dozen built-in key bindings for Zathura, but I did find a good article over it. MakeTechEasier.com Zathura Keyboard Shortcuts and the author of this does lay out in a nice table all of the built-in key bindings for Zathura. And again, because Zathura is configured with its own config file, the Zathura RC, right, you can actually rebind all of those key bindings to whatever you want to use. So let me show you Zathura in action. Let me switch over to this document. So this is a PDF of the Learn You a Haskell for great good book. So you can get a free PDF of this book if you want to learn Haskell. But you know, Zathura is very minimal. There's no title bars or menus, you know, it's just a window. And I really like this, especially from a presentation point of view, because when I'm presenting like a PDF slideshow on camera, I don't need menus and title bars, window decorations or any of that stuff on screen. I just need the PDF and nothing else. The other thing I really like is because Zathura doesn't have any title bars and menu bars. It doesn't have any arrows and things like that. It is keyboard driven, so you don't have to use the mouse at all to move through the document. Use the VIM keys. So if you use SHIFT-HJKL, those are your motion keys. So SHIFT-J would be down, of course, so SHIFT-J moves down a page, SHIFT-J moves down a page. And I can just keep going with SHIFT-J. Now if I want to go up SHIFT-K, of course, is the VIM motion key to go up. SHIFT-HNL would move left and right, but in this document it's already full screen and you really can't move anything left and right. Now if you just wanted to move, instead of by page, you wanted to move by line, you could do J, which moves one line down, or K moves up one line. Much like moving through a VIM document, SHIFT-J, capital G, takes you to the last page of the document. Gigi takes you to the first page of the document. If I wanted to go to the 10th page, I could do 10 capital G, and that would take me to page 10. Gigi, once again, gets me back to the top of the document. Now if you need to fit the document to a specific height, maybe you want the document to fill up the entire height of the window, which my document already is, but if it wasn't, I could hit A on the keyboard and it would take care of that for me. Now if you want to fit the document to the width of the screen, S on the keyboard makes it 100% of the width of the screen, but of course now it's a little bit too big, I can scroll up and down with the mouse wheel by the way, or J and K, but if I wanted to go back to filling it up by height, by the height of the window, A, once again, gets me that, so A for height, S for filling it to the width. Now if you want to fine tune zooming in and out, you could do a plus sign to zoom in, so shift equals is the plus sign on the keyboard, or you could do a minus sign to zoom out, and I believe you could also do this with the mouse wheel, although I normally don't operate so through with the mouse, I believe control and the mouse wheel, yeah, control plus the mouse wheel will move you in and out for the zoom. Gigi, back to the top of the document, A to get me back to the proper width. If you have a PDF that you need to rotate for some reason, maybe instead of a text document, it's an image and the image needs to be rotated 90 degrees, you could do R to rotate the image, R again to rotate it back around. If you do space on the keyboard, you could go to the next page, right, and if I do shift space, I could go back, but I'm not sure I would ever use those key bindings when shift J and K are quite a bit easier to hit on the keyboard. There is a command mode, and so through it, kind of like there's a command mode in Vim, I believe it's shift and semi colon, and yeah, you see, I get the colon, kind of like a colon for command mode in Vim, and I have no idea of the commands, but if I hit the tab key, I could get, yeah, it's really not much to choose from as far as map, unmap, so setting and un-setting key bindings, and then there's open, a file, print a file, you know, quit out of Zathura, which Q on the keyboard I believe is quit, but I'm going to try to avoid accidentally hitting that. By the way, the open file command, which you could get to through command mode, you could just hit O on the keyboard, and you will get the open command, and from there, if I wanted to navigate somewhere, you know, I actually remember my history, so if I wanted to go to this particular document here, which I used as part of a slideshow for a video on my other channel, DT Options, right, and this is how I do the slideshows for that. So Zathura is pretty powerful. Let me show you the config file. Let me open a terminal, and let me zoom in, let's cd into .config slash Zathura, and then I'll open this with them, the Zathura RC file, and I don't have much in mind, right. Really, I can't think of too much to do other than set GUI options to none. I don't want to see anything on screen, no bottom bar or top bar or anything, so I set the GUI options to none. I just want the PDF only, because when I'm using Zathura, I'm typically only using it as a slideshow on camera. And then I do a map B, so I'm mapping B on the keyboard to run the command adjust window to best fit. So if for some reason the size is weird on the PDF that I open, I just hit B on the keyboard and it automatically makes it to the best fit for that particular size window. So that's Zathura, a pretty minimal PDF viewer. Some people are going to want something a little more powerful, which there's a lot of really good PDF viewers. If you're looking for something more than just something to use as a slideshow, for example, if I get back to my desktop, I could open something like Events. So Events I think is one of the GNOME pieces of software, the default GNOME software suite. And Events is really neat, because if you actually want to read things, I mean, you can do a dual page view, you can put odd pages left, which is really nice when you're writing. So if you wanted to actually view a book, for example, if you were writing a book, how it would appear once it's binded. And of course, you could even have your little sidebar here, which you could navigate. So Events is really nice, very powerful, a lot of really cool features, but it's not as minimal. And honestly, if I was using Events, I don't like the slideshow feature of Events, it does have a full screen kind of slideshow. But I think Zathura, with all of those Vimlite key bindings and the fact that it has the config file that you can go ahead and set to your exact specifications for me, it just makes sense. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Gabe names Matt, Paul, Steve West, Arkotic, Armor Dragon, Commander, Ingrid, George, Lee, Matthew, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Solastria, Tienren, Tools, Devler, Warden, Tuan, Ubuntu, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick little look at Zathura would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. You like my work, I want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Zathura. Subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.