ZotNote

Automatize and manage your reading notes with Zotero & Better Bibtex Plugin (BBT). Note: ZotNote is still in early development and not production ready

Current features

• Simple installation via pipx/pip
• Full command-line interface to create, edit, and remove notes
• Graphical interface to select a Zotero item
• Support for various reading note templates

Planned features

• Annotation of reading notes and individual quotes using tags/keywords
  • Retrieval of relevant quotes based on these tags and keywords
  • Analytics based on these tags and keywords
• Enrich reading notes with more metadata from Zotero
• Simple reports about progress of literature review
• (dreaming) Automatically export collection of notes as an annotated bibliography.

Long-term vision

A literature review suite that connects to Zotero & BBT. Management of reading notes, reading/writing analytics, and basic qualitative text analysis (export reports as HTML via Jupyter notebooks). Export of reading notes in different formats (e.g., annotated bibliography).

You can find a roadmap for ZotNote here.

Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.6 or higher
• Zotero Standalone with Better Bibtex plugin

Recommended: Install via pipx

The recommended way to install ZotNote is using pipx. Pipx cleanly install the package in an isolated environment (clean uninstalls!) and automagically exposes the CLI-endpoints globally on your system.

pipx install zotnote

Option 2: Install via pip

However, you can also simply use pip. Please be aware of the Python version and environments you are using.

pip install zotnote

Option 3: Download from GitHub

Download the latest release from Github and unzip. Put the folder containing the scripts into your PATH.

Alternatively, run

[sudo] python3 setup.py install

or

python3 setup.py install --user

Option 4: Git clone (for developers)

git clone git@github.com:Bubblbu/zotnote.git

The project is being developed with Poetry as a dependency manager.

More instructions will follow soon!

Getting started

Usage: zotnote [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  CLI for ZotNote.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  add        Create a new note.
  config     Configure Zotnote from the command line.
  edit       Open a note in your editor of choice.
  remove     Remove a note
  templates  List all available templates for notes.

Configuration

After installation you should be able to simply run zotnote and be prompted to a quick command-line configuration.

ZotNote currently asks you for:

• A name which is used in all reading notes.
• An email address
• A folder to store your reading notes

Usage

Some basic use cases:

Create a note with the graphical interface (Zotero picker)

zotnote add

Create for specific citekey

zotnote add [citekey]

Edit a note (with graphical picker)

zotnote edit

or

zotnote edit [citekey]

You can explore each command in detail by adding --help.

Authors

Written by Asura Enkhbayar while he was quarantined.