Scrolex - A Horizontally Scrolled Document Viewer

- Scroll along the x coordinate
- Scroll along the x
- Scroll the x
- Scrolex

Scrolex is a document viewer optimized for HiDPI displays and designed for distraction-free, efficient reading. With its horizontal scrolling layout, Scrolex lets you see more pages at once, making it ideal for large monitors and wide screens.

demo-gh.mp4

Features

1. Horizontal Scrolling Layout

   Main Feature: Unlike traditional viewers, Scrolex uses a horizontal scroll layout along the X-axis. This layout lets users easily view multiple pages side by side, especially on widescreen or HiDPI monitors. It offers a refreshing and seamless reading experience for long documents.

2. Margin Cropping

   Scrolex includes a feature to crop document margins, allowing even more content to fit on-screen without unnecessary whitespace.

3. Scroll Wheel for Page Navigation

   Intuitive Navigation: Along with keyboard navigation Scrolex supports a simple scroll wheel action for moving between pages. Each scroll of the wheel moves the document one page to the left or right, offering quick and effortless navigation. This design choice minimizes interruptions and distractions, making it easy to stay focused on reading without needing to search for the needed keyboard key.

4. Dark Mode

   Scrolex can recolor document pages for comfortable reading in low-light environments while preserving their original hues. Dark mode is an explicit setting and remains enabled across sessions until turned off.

5. Wayland Support

   Scrolex supports both Wayland and X11 sessions.

Supported Formats

Scrolex renders every format its bundled MuPDF engine handles. The most common multipage document formats are:

• PDF
• EPUB (unencrypted)
• MOBI
• FB2
• XPS / OpenXPS
• CBZ (comic book archives)

Single-page formats such as SVG, plain text, and common raster images (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, …) open as well. DjVu is not supported.

Important

Brotli decoding is disabled for now. The Brotli decoder bundled with MuPDF has a critical vulnerability: CVE-2026-111497. PDF streams that use the /BrotliDecode filter do not render. This filter is rare. Scrolex will enable Brotli again when mupdf-rs ships the fix.

Shortcuts

Key / Action	Description
o / Ctrl + o	Open a document
Ctrl + t	Open a document in a new tab
Ctrl + w	Close the split pane, then the tab, then the window
t	Toggle table of contents
s	Open the current page in split view
Middle-click an internal link	Open the link in split view
Tab	Switch between the split panes
F11	Toggle full screen
l / PageDown	Next page
h / PageUp	Previous page
w	Zoom pages to fit the window's width
Home	First page
End	Last page
→	Scroll right
←	Scroll left
k / ↑	Pan up (zoomed-in page)
j / ↓	Pan down (zoomed-in page)
] / Ctrl + + / Ctrl + =	Zoom in
[ / Ctrl + -	Zoom out
Ctrl + 0	Reset zoom to 100%
Mouse wheel	Move one page left/right per notch
Ctrl + scroll	Zoom in/out (mouse wheel or touchpad)
f / Ctrl + f	Search in document
n / F3	Next match
N / Shift + F3	Previous match
Drag	Select text (also copied to the primary selection)
Ctrl + c	Copy the selected text to the clipboard
Esc	Close search / drop the selection / leave full screen

Installation. Linux

1. Install from the Snap Store (Ubuntu)

Scrolex is on Snapcraft.

sudo snap install scrolex

Linux Mint blocks snap by default so use Flathub if you are on Mint.

2. Install from Flathub (Fedora, openSUSE, Mint, SteamOS, others)

Scrolex is on Flathub.

flatpak install --user flathub com.andr2i.scrolex
flatpak run com.andr2i.scrolex

Drop --user from all commands to install system-wide instead (requires root).

If installation fails, the Flathub remote is possibly not configured. Add it:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

3. Install from AUR (Arch Linux)

If you're using Arch Linux or any Arch-based distribution, you can install Scrolex from the Arch User Repository (AUR).

yay -S scrolex-bin

4. Download and install .deb package from GitHub Releases (Debian 13 or newer)

The .deb package supports Debian 13 or newer and Ubuntu 24.04 or newer. The commands below download the latest release from the GitHub releases page and install it with APT, so that APT resolves its dependencies.

curl -LO "https://github.com/molecule-man/scrolex/releases/download/0.13.1/scrolex_0.13.1.deb"
sudo apt install ./scrolex_0.13.1.deb

5. Download from GitHub Releases (any distribution)

GTK 4.14 or newer must already be installed. On Arch:

sudo pacman -S gtk4

Then download the latest x86-64 pre-built binary archive, scrolex-0.13.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz, extract it, and run the scrolex executable.

6. Build from source

Needs GTK 4.14 or newer plus a C/C++ toolchain and clang, since the mupdf crate compiles its bundled C library and generates bindings with bindgen. On Arch:

sudo pacman -S gtk4 clang base-devel

Then:

# clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/molecule-man/scrolex.git
cd scrolex
# build the project using Cargo:
cargo build --release

After building, you will find the binary at the location target/release/scrolex. You can move the binary to a directory in your $PATH.

Installation. Windows

1. Install from the Microsoft Store

Scrolex is on the Microsoft Store. The Store installs the app and keeps it updated.

You can also install it from a terminal:

winget install --id 9P1K2SZLQQLK --source msstore

2. Download the zip from GitHub Releases

Download scrolex-0.13.1-x86_64-windows.zip from the GitHub releases page, extract it anywhere, and run scrolex.exe.

The zip carries its own GTK runtime, so you need nothing else. It installs nothing. The data files Scrolex creates while running are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%.

Windows shows a SmartScreen warning, because the executable is not signed yet. Select More info, then Run anyway.

License

Scrolex is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

The document engine, MuPDF, is vendored and statically linked. MuPDF is dual-licensed by Artifex Software under the AGPL v3 or a commercial license; because it is statically linked, distributed Scrolex binaries are covered by the AGPL. If you need to distribute Scrolex under different terms, you must obtain a commercial MuPDF license from Artifex.