Windows 10 / 11
A light PDF viewer, for reading and nothing else.
washi opens PDFs so you can read them. There is no editing, no search, no annotation. Carrying none of what reading does not need keeps it light and keeps the controls short. Cropping the margins away to fill the screen with the text, and turning pages by itself in fullscreen, are the two things that set it a little apart.
F switches between them in the app
Overview
What washi actually does
It opens PDFs and shows them to you. That is the whole job. Everything reading needs is in there, and nothing else is.
Open it, turn the pages
Double-click from Explorer, drag a file onto the window, or press Ctrl+O. From there the keyboard, the scroll wheel, or a click on either side of the window turns the pages.
Light, because of what is missing
No editing, no search, no annotation, no text extraction. Carrying none of what reading does not need leaves fewer controls to learn and less to slow it down.
Two ways to fit the page
Crop the margins away so the text fills the screen, or fit the whole page with the margins intact. F switches between them, and washi remembers which one you picked.
Watch it in fullscreen
Go fullscreen and it turns the pages on a timer you set. For reading on without touching anything, or from across the room.
Margins
Margins were for paper
Here is one of those four in more detail. The white space in a PDF is gutter and printing allowance — things a sheet of paper needed. On a screen it does nothing but eat the display. washi measures it on every page and takes it out.
Draw the page once, then count pixels
washi renders a 420px greyscale draft, decides the background colour by the most common value, and takes the bounds of everything that differs from it. That is why it works the same on a white journal page, a cream-coloured scan, or a slide with a dark background.
It ignores the CropBox
PDFs have a field that declares the visible area, but so many files leave it unset that it cannot be trusted. washi looks at the ink that is actually there rather than at what the file claims.
It stops itself from overreaching
On a page covered almost edge to edge, the zoom factor swings wildly on rounding alone, so it gets clamped. A page holding nothing but a folio number gets the same treatment from the other side, so a single digit never fills the screen.
Sometimes you want the margins
In some books the position of the text block on the sheet is itself information. Press F to fit the whole page instead, margins included. washi remembers which one you picked for next time.
Advance
Go fullscreen and it starts turning pages
Auto-advance is built for reading fullscreen. By default, entering fullscreen starts it and leaving stops it. The interval is a number of seconds, anywhere from 1 to 600.
| What you do | What happens |
|---|---|
| Enter fullscreen | Advancing starts on its own (the default; it can be turned off in the menu) |
| Leave fullscreen | It stops. A normal window is for reading at your own pace |
| Move or click the mouse | The countdown holds. Leave the mouse still for 1.5 seconds and it picks up where it left off |
| Press Esc | Advancing stops. Keep pressing to close the shortcut list, then to leave fullscreen |
| Turn a page yourself | The countdown restarts on that page |
| Reach the last page | It returns to the first page (the default). Press L and it stops there instead |
The mouse recovers when you let go of it; Esc stays stopped until you say otherwise. Nudging the pointer while you read should not skip a page, and neither should you have to restart it every time you do — so the two are treated differently on purpose.
Keys
Your hands stay on the keyboard
The scroll wheel and clicking either side of the window work too. In a normal window the menu bar along the top does all of the same things.
- → ↓ PageDown
- Next page
- ← ↑ PageUp
- Previous page
- Home / End
- First / last page
- F
- Fit to content ⇄ fit whole page
- F11 / F5
- Fullscreen
- Space
- Start / stop auto-advance
- + / −
- Change the interval by one second
- L
- At the last page: return to the first, or stop
- Ctrl+O
- Open a file (drag and drop works too)
- F1
- List the shortcuts
- Ctrl+W / Ctrl+Q
- Quit
Windows do not pile up
Open a second PDF while one is up and the existing window switches to it. Double-click a whole folder and you still end up with one window showing the last file.
It opens the way you left it
The fit mode, the interval, and the window position stay on your machine. There is nothing to set up again next time.
Scope
What it will not do
washi reads, and that is all. The features below are not missing yet — they are left out deliberately. If you need them, keep a viewer that does them alongside it.
Searching the text
There is no find-in-document. The text extraction API is not even declared, so nothing can call it.
Copying or extracting text
There is no path that pulls characters back out of a page.
Editing annotations
Annotations already in the file are drawn, but nothing can be written, edited, or saved.
Editing or exporting pages
No merging, no splitting, no saving a rotation. washi never writes to the PDF you opened.
Password-protected PDFs
There is no prompt to enter a password, so encrypted PDFs will not open.
It does not hold the file open while you read, either. The bytes are read once and the handle is closed, so you are free to replace or delete the original with it still on screen.
Requires
What you need
- OS
- Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)
- Network
- None. washi never connects
Get it
Get washi
From the Microsoft Store
Listing in progressThe Store handles signing and updates, so there is no certificate to install and no developer mode to turn on. One button installs it, and new versions replace themselves.
The Store page is not public yet. This will become a real link once it is.