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Looks very cool! Of course I see this literally 1 day after I finally go to the effort of installing zotero to keep track of academic-ish papers/pdfs that I have been accumulating.
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Ha, that’s too bad, but I think that Zotero is on the other extreme of the spectrum in terms of features. I’d say Zotero is great if you have a need (or personal preference) to have a big organizational system, where you have lots of context, additional notes & citation management, super fine-grained filing, many more different file types etc.
I wrote Paperboy to be the opposite: don’t force me to make too many decisions, just help me rename and move some files, then get out of my way :)
I was actually motivated by this feeling that if I put a lot of effort into feeding a tool, then I can never get rid of it, because a) it has a lot of magic metadata somewhere, b) I feel like I invested so much time that would then have been wasted. Even worse when it has a slightly intrusive online-component!
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I have a quite large library of papers, mostly from journals. A few ideas to consider:
- Allow to include fields in filename: I like to organize my pdfs by [Author] [Year] [Title]. It would be useful to allow the user to specify fields to use in the file name. This will help with retrieval of papers, because sometimes I remember the name of the author or the title.
- Allow to organize pdfs into folders: Once you start having a lot of papers (50?), scrolling through a single folder becomes chaotic. It would be useful to organize papers by the author’s initials or some other system (maybe tags).
- Integrate some sort of citation management database: This might be off, as you state that the goal of the project is a database-less pdf manager. This should be something straight forward to implement if you allow the user to input the main fields for the pdf.
Thank you for putting this tool out there. This is one of those things that I didn’t know I needed until I saw it. Good job!
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Those are all great ideas, some of which (like subfolders and/or tags) are on my to-do list. My approach is to think really carefully about avoiding micromanagement and having a good UI. I’ll try to find a way of having the advanced features be more ‘opt-in’. Ideally advanced options like subfolders or different fields would not get in the way (or clutter the UI) if you decide to keep it basic.
Note that you can already do [Author] [Year] [Title] in a pretty speedy way, you just won’t receive the renaming suggestions in that format. It might actually be a good idea to make one of the suggestions configurable like that, the limitation is often the lack of pdf metadata though.
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I do the first two. My filenames are Title Year Author since that’s order of importance for me. I also have subfolders just to cut down on the chaos. Some are organized, some are just a month/year combo. I don’t do citation management. It would be useful for academics, though. On that note, I just discovered Zotero yesterday on Hacker News with a ton of people saying they loved it. Worth checking out at least.
Very cool program! So exciting to see
.nixfiles already there!Glad you like it :) All the .nix credit goes to nmattia, but let me know in the issue tracker if you run into trouble. Afaik it only works with the unstable channel (and we didn’t pin the nixpkgs version yet).