Why?

The selling point of Evince for me is the previewing functionality. You can hover over any reference in a PDF and it will preview what is going on at the referenced part. I don't know any other PDF viewer that has that feature. Porting this feature to Zathura would be the better way to go, but would require some engineering. This might be some project I will look into in the future but for now I came to the conclusion that Evince is just the best for me.

So my goal with this repo is to make Evince behave more like Zathura. That is why this repo contains patches for the following major changes to upstream:

• A (zathura-like) status bar can be included at the bottom.
• The menu bar (or toolbar) can be hidden via a keyboard shortcut. This is ALT-m or F12 by default.
• Evince overwrites the pdf on hitting CTRL+s. By default, Evince always asks for a new filename.
• Some keyboard shortcuts are added/modified/removed. Examples are J and K for page up/down, or CTRL+o for going back in history.
• Scripts can be launched by keybindings.

Note that these are just the major patches. Check the patches section for a list of all patches.

You can apply only a subset of the patches, just to your liking. And of course, you can modify the code after applying any patches. Modifications to keyboard shortcuts can be done in the file shell/ev-application.c.

You can expect me to update the patches when they are broken by upstream changes, at least as long as no other PDF viewer has the above mentioned feature. I will tag commits with the same tags used upstream to indicate that the patches work with the tagged Evince version.

Installation

For an easy installation check out the section about Nix/NixOS. Otherwise you have to build the package for your system or copy over the built binary. Instructions below.

Applying Patches

First you need to get the latest evince code. Then you need to clone this patches repo. After that you can start applying any patches you would like to have included in your build. Applying them in any other order than the lexical one is currently not supported. Also you might run into various issues when you apply only some of the patches since they may depend on each other. These safest choice is to just include every patch. I suggest first applying all patches, and only after that changing stuff in the code by hand. For building instructions refer to the building section.

git clone 'https://github.com/fabian-thomas/evince-patches'
cd evince-patches
git clone 'https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince'
# -C 0 helps with conflicts between the patches.
git -C evince am -C 0 ../patches/0-vim-like-bindings.patch
git -C evince am -C 0 ...
git -C evince am -C 0 ...
# patch the code further (e.g., modify keybindings)
# now build and install (see below)

Note: Make sure to apply 0-vim-like-bindings.patch first, since it conflicts with some patches. Note: You can also use the apply.sh script to apply all but the sync-pages patch.

Building

You need to choose the correct prefix for your system. For most systems this should be /usr. Note that these instructions only update the evince binary, so this is based on the assumption that your libraries and other files of evince should already be up to date. I'm not sure if this assumption breaks with non-rolling-release distributions. If so check how you can install the compiled files. I guess that should not be to hard.

meson setup --prefix /usr build
meson compile -C build
sudo cp build/shell/evince "$(which evince)"

Patches

This section lists and describes all of the available patches.

Status bar

zathura-like.patch

This adds a (zathura-like) status bar to the bottom of the window. The status bar shows both the file path and the current page.

Toggle menu bar

add-keyboard-binding-to-toggle-menu-bar.patch

Adds Alt+m as keybinding for toggling the menu bar. Modify the binding to your liking.

Hide menu bar by default

initially-hide-menu-bar.patch

Hides the menu bar initially. If not used with the toggle patch, basically disables the menu bar.

Vim-like bindings

0-vim-like-bindings.patch

Adds vim-like keybindings. Modify to your liking.

Note: This patch should be applied first since others conflict with it.

Add annotation right click

add-annotation-right-click.patch

Add an annotation from the right click menu.

Save/Overwrite action + Overwrite pdf by default

add-save-action-and-make-default.patch

Add a save action to menus and use it as default on CTRL+s. By default, Evince always asks for a new filename instead of overwriting the pdf.

Launch scripts on keybinding

custom-commands.patch

This is my personal patch for launching scripts from Evince. You need to modify the patch or the sources after applying the patch. I use this patch to open notes for the current PDF in my text editor and to associate a PDF with a bibtex entry.

Web search from selection

add-web-search-action.patch

This patch adds an action to the context menu that performs a web search with the current text selection. The environment variable SEARCH_ENGINE specifies which search engine in the format https://domain.org?query=%s (the %s is replaced by the selected text). XDG_OPEN specifies which binary/script should be used to open the link. If this environment variable is unset, the default xdg-open handler is used.

Change current page from dbus

sync-page.patch

This patch is not actively used by me. It shows how to add a new dbus command. In that case, how the active page in Evince can be changed with dbus. The repo also includes a sync-page.sh script (in the misc dir) that shows how to execute the dbus action.

Nix

Test it out without installation:

nix run github:fabian-thomas/evince-patches

Install it permanently:

nix profile install github:fabian-thomas/evince-patches

NixOS

On NixOS you can just include the overlay.nix in your overlays or just install the flake.