Evince Enhanced

Evince Enhanced is a fork of the GNOME Evince document viewer that adds tabbed browsing, split views, and a few workflow improvements, while keeping Evince's fast, simple rendering of PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS, DVI, and Comic Book archives.

It ships under a distinct application identity (io.github.chenkenbio.EvinceEnhanced) so it can be installed and run alongside a distribution's stock Evince.

This software is licensed under the GPLv2. Original Evince code is © the Evince authors.

Improvements over upstream Evince

• Tabbed browsing — open multiple documents as tabs in a single window, with a tab bar, drag-to-reorder, and reopen closed tab support.
• Split view — split the window left / right / top / bottom to view two documents, or two locations in one document, side by side. When only one tab is open a split opens immediately; with several tabs you choose which one fills the new pane.
• Smarter link handling — right-click an internal link to Open in New Tab or Open in Split View, in addition to Open in New Window. When the window is already split, links open in the adjacent pane instead of nesting another split.
• Clearer cursor-mode icons — the pointer / select-text / hand toolbar toggles use more legible icons.
• AppImage packaging — a self-contained, relocatable build recipe under packaging/appimage.

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
New tab	Ctrl+T
Reopen closed tab	Ctrl+Shift+T
Next / previous tab	Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Split right	Ctrl+Shift+E
Split down	Ctrl+Alt+D
Close split	Ctrl+Alt+U
Focus other pane	F6

Building

An AppImage (bundling all runtime dependencies) can be built with:

bash packaging/appimage/build-appimage.sh
# result: build/appimage/dist/Evince-Enhanced-<version>-x86_64.AppImage

To build and run from source with Meson:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
./build/shell/evince

See README.debian.md for the Debian/Ubuntu build dependencies.

Requirements

• GNOME Platform libraries
• Poppler for PDF viewing

Optional backend libraries

• Spectre for PostScript (PS) viewing
• DjVuLibre for DjVu viewing
• Kpathsea for Device-independent file format (DVI) viewing
• Archive library for Comic Book Resources (CBR) viewing
• LibTiff for Multipage TIFF viewing
• LibGXPS for XML Paper Specification (XPS) viewing

Acknowledgments

Evince Enhanced builds on GNOME Evince by the Evince authors.

The enhancements in this fork were developed with the help of AI coding assistants, credited as co-authors:

• OpenAI Codex
• Claude Code