Interactive UI documentation

[Inkbottle007]

$ papis --version; cat ~/.config/papis/config 
papis, version 0.11.1
[papers]
dir = ~/Documents/mypapers

# [settings]
# default-library = mypapers

Hi, When I use papis, I get "stuck" in a weird UI, which I know nothing about, and is not afaik, described in the documentation. What I see on my terminal is inconsistent with what I see on the documentations. "Interactive" interface, is not the first thing that come to the mind when thinking of a CLI tool. git has sometimes, less like sort of behavior, with colors, instead of plain cat behavior (w. colors), it never however, afaik, put you in interactive interface. So far, the use of the tool is very confusing, very tough to manage. I end up having the operations done. But it's very uncomfortable to use. Too often I have to go in another terminal and do killall papis.

When using papis add myurl, the colors used in the 3rd part of the operation, where it never fails to show some unrelated document that is deemed to be identical to the "allegedly a document" related to myurl, well, the colors then, force me to use alternative terminal, because with many light color themes, it is displayed in black on black. Thanks, Chris

[alejandrogallo]

Hi,

thank you for taking the time to write these lines.

The UI stuff was a workaround in order to be able to have a way to select what one wants whenever the automatic adding of documents matches more than one backend. For instance whenever I add a url, I might have information from the fallback backend, the ad-hoc parser implemented for the url or maybe from a scraped doi throug crossref.

When we did this, it was not clear how we should expect the user to decide what to take and what to leave, and what you complain about is the best workaround that I could come up with at the time. I agree that it is far from perfect, but this is the rationale of it, in case you're are asking yourself how on earth one would do such a thing. I get that you're frustrated because it does not speak to you in the way that you would like it to, I'd tell you to try the --batch option in papis add.

Regarding the documentation, it is true, here I must apologize, since we thought that it would be a temporary UI until it matures, we did not document it. Right now, it seems that it will remain like this and should be documented.

I must say I am also not happy with this interface, but for most people it works and to design it otherwise would mean to allocate time and resources for it that right now I need to put elsewhere. I am happy to get specific suggestions and discuss here.

Trying to get the main points condensed would be the following

• multiple matchinf or the input token in

  papis add <token>

  or

  papis add --from arxiv 123456.6v1 --from doi 1324/45 path/to/file.pdf

• how to get user input to decide what source is good and what information therein to take.
• one can't assume that the user uses vi or emacs or gedit or has some diff tools there to be used.

Possible extensions:

• generalize this setup in order to make it possible to use the same infrastructure adding a paper from the webapplication??

Cheers!

[Inkbottle007]

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. I'll have a look at the source code whenever possible to lean more about it.