One thing I do constantly as I read an academic paper is click citation links to see the work being referenced. The page jumps to the bibliography section — but with 10–20 entries crammed together on the page, it’s difficult to spot the specific entry you landed on.

It’s a minor annoyance, but I now maintain a micro fork of my PDF reader Sioyek so I’m more inclined to improve workflows like this.

My solution: briefly highlight the destination when navigating to it — similar to Neovim’s highlight-on-yank feature — then fade it out. The quick flash gives you an immediate visual anchor before it vanishes:

I put together a hacky implementation and Sioyek’s developer was receptive to the idea. After some back and forth, the feature has now landed in the development branch of Sioyek, exposing a few new config options:

highlight_link_destination 1
link_destination_highlight_timeout 0.75
link_destination_highlight_color #ffff00

and the result is: