pdf-tools is an alternative to the built-in docview that renders pages on demand, supports rich navigation and search, annotations etc. However, common actions such as selecting text or searching are slow, likely because each change to the display has to render a new PNG file for display. Furthermore, while it hooks into isearch, evil-mode’s search isn’t supported. All in all, it is not a satisfying PDF reader and we much prefer zathura.

This is unfortunate, because we’d have liked to use org-noter.

We’ll keep pdf-tools installed regardless since it’s still more powerful than docview.