Document Viewer (Evince) history navigation
Under Evince 3.4 you can activate a "back" button by editing the toolbar (Edit → Toolbar; drag and drop functions to toolbar):
I don't think there's any hotkey by default but you might be able to add a custom one.
If you're looking for customization you might be better off with a PDF viewer like Okular or qpdfview anyway. Both should offer the function you're searching for.
As of Evince 3.32, the key bindings are Alt + P and Alt + N. I cannot find the toolbar button anymore.
Reference: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/770
Ubuntu 20.10
Things have flipped around now, it's so much fun:
- Evince 3.38 history is working fine, notably with the Alt+P/Alt+N shortcuts (but I discovered that their header only search is useless: How to find/search for text results only in the Outline/headers in PDFs open in Evince? so I still can't use it daily)
- Okular 20.08 history is completely broke with Alt+Shift+Left/Right, possibly: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg489269.html
I'll still go crazy one of these days.
I've made a minimal test file for this now: https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/multipage_refs/multipage_refs.pdf
Annoying Evince history bugs
These have haunted me for years, including Ubuntu 18.04, Evince 3.28.2, and make the history jump back feature unusable for the technical documents I read all day:
the history jump does not jump to the expected location of a sane human:
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/399
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/558
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/810
there was no default (
Alt+Left) shortcut / it is not documented / I don't have the patience to find out how to create it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/770Tha bug was fixed in Evince 3.32 as mentioned at: https://askubuntu.com/a/1150128/52975 and as of 3.34.1-1 I have a "Keyboard Shortcuts" menu entry that shows "Alt + P" and "Alt +N" as the shortcuts.
However, possibly due to the aforementioned history bugs, the feature is still useless to me, e.g. if I visit https://static.docs.arm.com/ddi0487/fa/DDI0487F_a_armv8_arm.pdf and click a table of contents link, Alt + P does nothing instead of jumping back to the table of contents as expected.
You should go and upvote them.
Best solution I've found for Ubuntu 20.04
Use Okular. It has a default jump at Alt + Shift + Left/Right, and other key features like searching in the Table of Contents (or at least has them in a place I can easily find).
Best solution I've found for Ubuntu 18.04
Use Firefox!: What PDF viewers are available for Ubuntu? Okular was buggy there too, I forgot why now.