TITLE: Scripting qutebrowser to grab papers with scidownl
DATE: 2020-10-17
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I have been using scidownl to download scientific papers using that
I find on the web. It's quicker than using the journals' own pdf
download interface, which often requires multiple button clicks and
validating through my university.

 [scidownl]: https://github.com/Tishacy/SciDownl

With scidownl I can copy a DOI that I find on the web and download
the paper:

   scidownl -D "10.2307/3236848"

To further streamline the process, I wrote a little keybinding for
qutebrowser, my web browser, which allows me to highlight a DOI on
the webpage, hit the keybinding (,d), and download the paper to my
~/Downloads directory in the background for reading later:

 [qutebrowser]: https://qutebrowser.org/

   config.bind(',d', 'enter-mode caret ;; yank selection ;; spawn
~/bin/scidownl_qb {clipboard}')

scidownl_qb is just a shell script which downloads the file to the
right location:

   #!/usr/bin/env sh

   /usr/local/bin/./scidownl -D "$1" -o /Users/johngodlee/Downloads

Note that I had to include the full path to the scidownl executable
in the shell script. This is because qutebrowser uses a different
$PATH to the rest of the OS.

 [qutebrowser uses a different $PATH to the rest of the OS]:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4273

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