Being hackable (python) is certainly nice, but many of the steps listed on the homepage are a lot faster and easier with other tools such as Zotero or straight BibTeX. Especially manually entering titles or other metadata on the cli - that would be the seventh level of hell for me. I want one click on a paper's webpage and be done.
Of course much of that can be done with doi2bib [0], arxiv2bib [1], etc., which you can combine with the wonderful bibtool [2] to keep a clean bibtex file. That's what I use and the advantage of this over papis is that you can version control it.
That said papis has its use. It's less heavy than zotero, a bit less proprietary format (the info is stored in yaml files iirc) and it provides a layer over bibtex. If it had full text indexing and search I could see myself using it more.
[0] https://github.com/bibcure/bibcure
Some areas where I would love to see innovation, and that seem entirely plausible for papis:
- Collaboratively clean metadata (i.e. share sets of papers with collaborators in a less silo-esque way than Zotero's online libraries
- Do a better job at collating related versions (i.e. multiple related talks, preprint, online first and published version) ...
- Automatically track and import new papers into staging area
- Automatically fetch PDFs from some external source (and share with collaborators)
Most of these are possible in some existing apps, but it seems that the designers always expect people to joyfully curate every nook and cranny of their libraries, when in reality I have five duplicate versions of many papers, each missing some crucial metadata, none being linked to the one PDF file that's somehow stuck on a WebDav share, and Google scholar metadata polluting BibTeX fields but omitting crucial details such as the publisher.
This field really is another case of "we can re-land and re-use rockets, but digitally organizing a theoretically well-structured information space is impossible".
papis zotero serve to start listening to your browser for incoming data. Whenever you click the zotero button to add a paper, papis will add this paper to the library."
Bit hacky but this made me want to try it.
