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onon

Getting started

onon is a PDF viewer you use from the keyboard. It draws pages with MuPDF and shows nothing beside them but a status bar, which you can hide. It also opens XPS, EPUB, MOBI, FictionBook, comic book archives (CBZ, CBT) and most image formats.

Install

Section titled “Install”

With Homebrew:

Terminal window
brew install aethar01/tap/onon

Or download the disk image for Apple silicon or Intel from the latest release and drag onon.app to Applications. onon runs on macOS 12 and later.

Open a document

Section titled “Open a document”

Open a file from your file manager, drop it on the window, or start onon from a terminal:

Terminal window
onon paper.pdf

With no file, onon reopens the document you read last, at the place you left it. Every document keeps its own place, zoom and marks between sessions.

The first keys

Section titled “The first keys”
Key Does
j / k Scroll down / up
J / K Next / previous page
gg / G First / last page
/ / ? Search forward / backward
n / N Next / previous match
o Outline (table of contents)
O Overview grid of every page
F Follow a link by typing its hint
gr Recent files
: Command prompt
F1 or g? Help: every command, key and option
q Quit

Counts work the way they do in Vim: 10j scrolls ten steps and 3J moves three pages. Each system’s usual shortcuts work too. On macOS that is Cmd-F to search, Cmd-Z to undo and Cmd-= to zoom, and the menu bar lists actions with their keys. On Windows and Linux it is Ctrl-F, Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-= and F11.

Further

Section titled “Further”
  • Reading covers search, links, marks, highlights and presentation mode.
  • Configuration shows where config.lua lives and how to change keys and options.
  • Themes changes how onon looks, from one colour to every panel’s shape.