VSCodium (or any other flavour) with the PDF Viewer plugin will allow you to browse and view PDFs.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Will remember this as this might be close enough in case other solutions won't do
Firefox
Maybe I would
- Create a file called
pdfs.html - Add embedded PDFs
<embed src="pdf1.pdf"></embed> <embed src="pdf2.pdf"></embed> <embed src="pdf3.pdf"></embed> - Maybe give it a container div with display grid for min size and useful layout
- Open the HTML file in my webbrowser Firefox
To generate the embed codes for every PDF file in a folder I would use my command line shell Nushell, which generates the embeds for all files for me.
ls *.pdf | each {|x| $'<embed src="($x.name)"></embed>'} | str join
What do you mean by “open multiple files at once” and “viewing a directory”?
Replied to schnurrito with the answer. In short, i want to view files in a directory as one would view photos in a gallery, as I can't always tell beforehand which file is relevant to me and I'd like to be able to move quickly between files, instead of opening many files and then closing the irrelevant ones.
So you want a preview of the first page of each PDF as a thumbnail?
No, i want an easy way to navigate between unopened pdf files within the same directory
I think OP might be looking for something like nomacs or Gwenview except for PDFs instead of images. I don't have the answer to the question, but I can see what OP is looking for.
That's pretty close to what I'd be looking for, yes, a problem I'm having with common pdf viewers is that I'd need to open the files I'd want to read from beforehand, instead of just passing to the next file like i would in a gallery.
This requires that I'd know which files are relevant to me before reading said files.
That said, my use case does sound unique so I'm not surprised it's hard to figure out what im looking for :)
Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?
It's a php file you drop into a folder that creates a gallery of the files (including pdfs). There are security settings and visual customisations you can change. If you know what you're doing you can access the file remotely, too. I've used it for a while and found it helpful.
Looks perfect to my use case, will try it out, thanks :)
Not OP but that is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!
KDE's Dolphin (a file explorer) can show previews of PDF files.
Emacs can easily do that pdf viewer and one of the several tree folder packages.