yazi/Q/How can I preview PDFs?
How can I preview PDFs in yazi?
Answer
- AI/Response
- yazi ships a built-in
pdf previewer in the [plugin] section: it renders PDFs via pdftoppm (Poppler) and shows pages in the preview column through the same image pipeline as other previews. - Prerequisites: install Poppler so
pdftoppm is on your PATH (on macOS, common options are Homebrew brew install poppler or a Poppler build your package manager provides). If the preview is empty or errors, missing Poppler is the first thing to check. - Terminal / emulator: inline image previews need a terminal that supports Yazi’s image protocols (see notes in this graph on Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc.). Without that, you may still get text fallbacks or blank previews depending on the file type.
- Configuration references: built-in previewers are listed under
[plugin] → previewers in yazi.toml | Yazi; the pdf plugin is described there as bridging pdftoppm and the preview. [preview] max_width / max_height cap decoded image size (run yazi --clear-cache after changing them). - Open externally: use
open (or your [opener] rules) if you prefer a dedicated PDF app regardless of preview.
My Notes