Viki

Distractionless PDF and image annotation.

Tauri · macOS + Windows · Cream paper

Most annotation apps shove a sidebar of buttons at you and fight your attention with branded chrome. Viki gets out of the way: cream paper across both panes, serif body type, a paper-fold seam between viewer and notes, and three tools that do exactly what their names say.

Three tools, six colors

Highlight: Freehand stroke over PDFs and images. Vector points stored in normalized page coordinates, so they re-render crisply at any zoom. Four brush sizes from fine pen to thick marker.
Region: Drag a rectangle to bracket a chart, photo, or paragraph. The border draws in the active color.
Erase: Click any annotation to remove it. Bound to E; ⌘Z brings it back.

Amber

Olive

Rose

Sage

Slate

Lavender

All six retoned to read on cream and on warm dark.

What you get

Cream #F5F2EA page in the day, warm #1A1815 at night — system, light, dark on ⌘T
Three-pane layout: PDF or image · paper-fold seam · notes — all on one continuous sheet
Bidirectional hover-link — hover a marking on the page or its note in the panel; the partner highlights and scrolls into view
Notes are full prose with auto-linkified URLs and clickable links
Search filters notes live (⌘F); cards outside the match dim in place
Undo / redo per file (⌘Z · ⌘⇧Z) covering both creates and deletes
Native cursor that recolors with your active marking color
Export annotated PDF (markings baked in) or Markdown notes
Local SQLite — no account, no cloud, no telemetry
Cross-platform from one source — macOS today, Windows + Linux next

Keyboard

`⌘O`	Open a file
`⌘F`	Focus search
`⌘Z`	Undo
`⌘⇧Z`	Redo
`⌘T`	Cycle theme
`H` · `R` · `E`	Switch tool
`1`…`6`	Pick color
`Esc`	Clear active selection

Stack

Tauri 2 — Rust shell, one source for macOS · Windows · Linux
React 19 · TypeScript · Vite
PDF.js for rendering · pdf-lib for export-with-annotations baked in
SQLite via tauri-plugin-sql for local annotation storage

Download · v0.1.2

macOS · Universal macOS · Apple Silicon Windows · x64

.dmg ~6–11 MB · .exe ~4 MB · ad-hoc signed, not notarised

First open on macOS may show "Viki cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" — right-click the app and choose Open. If you see "Viki is damaged", run xattr -cr /Applications/Viki.app once after moving the app to Applications.

All artifacts and changelog → github.com/theinvestmentbankr/viki/releases