Scripting qutebrowser to grab papers with scidownl

DATE: 2020-10-17
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee


I have been using scidownl[1] 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.

1: https://github.com/Tishacy/SciDownl (https://github.com)

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[2], 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:

2: https://qutebrowser.org/ (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[3].

3: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4273 (https://github.com)