PDF Reader

A minimal, single-window PDF reader for Linux. Open a PDF, read it. Page thumbnails in a side panel. Step through pages with the keyboard.

Built on Tauri 2 (Rust + system webview) with a TypeScript frontend. PDF rendering via PDF.js inside the webview; Rust does only file I/O and state. See SPEC.md for the design rationale.

v1 reads PDFs. v2 will add Word.

Features

• Open — drag-drop, CLI arg, Ctrl+O. Formats (v1): PDF.
• Fullscreen — F or F11, Esc to exit.
• Quiet by design — no settings panel, no toolbar, no theme switcher. Locked light palette, custom titlebar.

(More features land per the milestones in SPEC.md. M1 ships with first-page rendering only.)

Keybindings (M1)

Action	Key
Open	Ctrl+O
Fullscreen	F or F11
Exit fullscreen	Esc
Close window	Ctrl+W
Quit	Ctrl+Q

Run from CLI

krill-pdf-reader path/to/paper.pdf

Without an arg, the app starts empty — drag-drop or Ctrl+O to load.

Build from source

Requires Rust 1.77+, Node 20+, pnpm, and Tauri 2's Linux build deps.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # development with hot reload
pnpm tauri build    # release artifacts in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

Releasing

Bump the version in package.json, src-tauri/Cargo.toml, and src-tauri/tauri.conf.json (all three must match), then:

pnpm release

This runs tauri build and gathers AppImage + .deb under release/v<version>/ with SHA256 checksums. Tag and push to trigger the GitHub Release workflow.

License

MIT.