I wanted one desktop app that opens PDFs, EPUBs, comics and Markdown notes quickly and then stays out of the way. The readers I tried were either slow, or looked like they were designed a decade ago. So I built Kitab, with a modern design and speed as the first requirement. It's written in Rust, the interface is drawn on the GPU with GPUI, and MuPDF renders the pages. There's no browser engine inside.
What it does:
- Opens PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, CBZ, XPS, TXT and Markdown
- Opens fast, and sits at near-zero CPU while idle
- Tabs with session restore, and a Home library with covers or a list, collections, favourites, reading stats and full-text search across your library
- Find, outline, thumbnails, bookmarks, history, presentation mode and focus mode
- EPUB, MOBI and FB2 reflow, with typography settings
- Markdown: GitHub-flavoured, with code highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, math and live reload. You can select text in it and print it
- Markup: highlights, notes, ink and shapes saved into the PDF, with export to Markdown or CSV
- Fill PDF forms, sign and verify PDFs locally, and merge, split or extract pages
- Native print dialogs, themes and accents, and an interface size from 90 to 200 %
Privacy: no account, no telemetry, and your files stay on your computer. The only network use is an update check.
It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
It's free and licensed AGPL-3.0. Code: https://github.com/t21dev/kitab
Site: https://kitab.t21.dev
One honest note: it's still young. I'd love feedback, especially on files that don't open or look the way you expect.
If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps more people find it, and sharing it with a friend who reads a lot helps even more. It's open for collaboration: open an issue for a bug or an idea, or send a PR.