I’ve been using Firefox to view PDFs and it works fine. Recently though I wanted to try something more minimal with vim keybindings. Found two options: Zathura and tdf (terminal pdf viewer).
What I’m curious about is why someone would choose a TUI pdf viewer over a regular one (like Zathura). What are the actual advantages people find in practice. tdf mentions being fast but I wonder if that’s something you’d actually notice day to day?
Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ? Maybe someone uses one here?
Tdf seems relatively popular with 1.4k github stars.


It’s the same reason I like TUI utilities like tiv, the terminal image viewer.
Sometimes I don’t want to have my workflow broken just to quickly check the contents or layout of what the file contains, I just need to glance at it and continue with what I’m doing.