zathura
Keyboard-driven, plugin-based document viewer for Linux and BSD, with PDF handled by poppler or MuPDF.
Jobs View
Since 2009
Where your files are processed
No server involved
An installed local viewer. Documents are opened from the filesystem and rendered on the machine by whichever format plugin is installed, with no vendor service and no account, and no document upload or telemetry described in the project material. One outbound action is documented: links in a document open in an external browser, which sends nothing about the document but is outbound all the same, so this describes local document viewing rather than guaranteeing no outbound interaction.
An installed local application. Documents are opened from the filesystem and rendered on the machine, with no account and no service to send them to. The project documents one outbound interaction: links in a document open in an external browser, which sends nothing about the document but is an outbound action all the same. There is no document upload and no telemetry described in the project material, and it is a structural fact about a local viewer rather than a measurement.
What it does
zathura is a document viewer built around the keyboard rather than the mouse. It is minimal by design — no toolbars, no ribbons, the document filling the window — and almost everything about it is set in a configuration file. The unusual part of its architecture is that format support is not built in: zathura is a front end, and separate plugins provide the backends, so a PDF can be rendered by either poppler or MuPDF depending on which plugin is installed, and PostScript, DjVu and other formats are additions rather than extras bolted onto a PDF reader. That makes it the viewer here most obviously aimed at people who live in a terminal, an editor and a LaTeX build loop — SyncTeX works in both directions, and the document reloads itself when the file changes underneath it.
Best for: People working on Linux or BSD who read documents the way they read code: from the keyboard, with everything remappable, and often in a LaTeX or academic workflow where jumping between source and typeset output matters. The plugin architecture is also a genuine advantage for anyone who wants a viewer that does not drag in a full desktop stack — a PDF viewer built on MuPDF is a different proposition from one built on poppler, and here that is a package choice rather than a fork.
Worth knowing: It is not a cross-platform application. The project targets Linux and BSD and the packages live in distribution repositories; there is no Windows build, and on macOS it is a Homebrew formula rather than the project's own concern, so a reader on Windows should look elsewhere. Format support depends entirely on which plugins are installed — a zathura without the PDF plugin cannot open a PDF at all, and the licence of what you end up with depends on the backend as much as on zathura. Version numbers are dates rather than semantic versions, which makes judging how current a distribution package is harder than it should be. It is a viewer: it displays, searches, exports images and attachments, and prints, and it does not edit, annotate or convert. And the configuration-file approach means the initial experience is a default keymap and very little else — the customisation is the point, but it is work.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Linux
- Website
- pwmt.org
- Requires an account
- Not verified
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- No
- Data residency
- Not verified
- Open source
- Yes
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- zlib, read from the licence files rather than inferred: the core LICENSE and the zathura-pdf-poppler plugin's LICENSE are both the same 866-byte zlib text. Other format plugins were not read, so the licence of a given installation depends on which plugins are installed.
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 326 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish: Recorded as `none` on absence, and structurally: this is a reader. It renders documents, follows links, searches, browses the index, reads metadata, exports images and attachments, opens encrypted documents and prints — a documented feature list that modifies nothing in the file. What it does not establish: that a plugin could not add an editing surface later, since the architecture is explicitly plugin-based and the plugin set was not surveyed beyond the PDF backends.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded — not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“zathura now uses a plugin based system for supported document types which makes it possible for you to choose which file formats you want your version of zathura to support. This also makes it possible to use different backends for the same document type: For instance we provide a plugin for PDF documents using either the poppler or the mupdf library.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Present verbatim under the main features heading. It is the architectural fact that distinguishes zathura from the other viewers in this index: a PDF reader is normally a PDF reader, whereas here the PDF support is a plugin and the choice of poppler or MuPDF is a deployment decision. It also has a licensing consequence the page does not discuss and this record does not invent — the core is zlib, but what a given installation is built from depends on the installed plugins, so the licence recorded here covers the engine rather than everything a user might end up running.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 46cf0e87c9d6fbbe797afa0e8057ed3540e954fde28df6097a57ff7f8414edef
How we checked: https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/ rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs on 2026-09-22 (visible text 3334 bytes) and the claim checked against that rendered text. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that text.
-
“zathura makes it possible to completely view and navigate through different documents without using a mouse. Functions to scroll or zoom are mapped to certain keys as well as the possibility to follow or open links that are shown in the document.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed, and the page is specific rather than promotional about how it works: pressing "f" highlights every link on the visible page and typing one of the shown numbers follows it. Recorded because "keyboard-driven" is the kind of label a vendor applies to anything with shortcuts, and this page documents the mechanism well enough for a reader to judge it. The same section documents bookmarks saved with ":bmark" and quickmarks bound to a single key, which is the level of detail that makes the claim checkable.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 46cf0e87c9d6fbbe797afa0e8057ed3540e954fde28df6097a57ff7f8414edef
How we checked: Same rendered page and hash as the claim above; the keyboard-navigation description was read together with the feature list beneath it, including the SyncTeX, bookmark and quickmark sections.
-
“Whenever the file that you are currently looking at changes (e.g.: you are working heavily on a LaTeX document and you compile it to view the changes), zathura automatically detects that and reloads the document without any hesitation.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed. Recorded alongside the SyncTeX feature because the two describe the same audience: one reloads the document when the file changes, the other navigates between source and typeset output in both directions. That combination is what places this viewer in a write-compile-read loop rather than in document review, and it is the clearest evidence on the page about who the tool is for.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 46cf0e87c9d6fbbe797afa0e8057ed3540e954fde28df6097a57ff7f8414edef
How we checked: Same rendered page and hash as the claims above; the automatic-reloading and SyncTeX sections were read together, since both describe the LaTeX workflow.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked — it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools keep your file on your machine — what we count as processing on your own device.
- Open source PDF tools, and what their licences require — what open source does and does not tell you.