The solution is emacs. I know you’ve got a lot invested in vim already. You can get instant LaTeX rendering with AUCTeX, view the pdf in emacs with pdf-tools, which can be used with something like org-ref (there are many bibliography packages) to query a db with the DOI of the pdf. (Try saying that two times fast). This EmacsConf talk should give you a taste of what I mean:

https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/research/

Your old post with instantly rendering latex snippets actually inspired me to start using vim/LaTeX. This opened up a whole new world for me. I started programming, got back into my engineering degree, started using emacs/org-mode and have nearly finished the degree. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I hadn’t seen your post. It revealed a way of using computers that I had never seen before.

This one?

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678

Yes, this is the one. I couldn’t help but want the same speed and beauty as in that post.

Where are you taking your degree?

Monash university

Try emacs and org-mode sometime. Configurability is off the charts and vi keybindings are easily configurable (and so are the snippets). I loved the workflow, I believe that a mind like yours will also find emacs elisp captivating and I would love to see what you could come up with in that much more flexible ecosystem (I am a former Vim evangelist)

What does org mode have to do with the problem where you have a document open in a PDF viewer and you want to retrieve the location of the document in the file system and what page is currently showing in the viewer's window?

The fact that pdf-tools (in emacs) makes this an utterly trivial task.

If you're using Org-ref, and have used that to drill down into your pdfs then you always have the document context (and bibtex etc context) from within emacs. But I don't think that is the OPs use case, so apologies for the noise. Also careful use of unix find with pdfgrep can be handy.

I guess it will be easier to get it working with Zotero, as it's open source, and I think it even supports custom plug-ins.

Yes, Zotero does support custom plug-ins ("add-ons").

On recent-ish versions of evince it is possible to do a bit more via dbus. For example, forward and reverse synctex search between evince and vim over dbus is done at [1]. I use this when I use evince, but I acknowledge that it has stupid flaws.

[1]: https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved

Having written this, I am actually completely incapable of retrieving the page number over dbus. (As you had mentioned). I'm a bit surprised that forward and reverse search can still be done.

No questions. You're a pretty swell dude and I used a lot of your advice while writing my thesis. Love your work.

Have you tried contacting the developers? This seems like a feature that every pdf viewer should have.