Hour challenge 12/7: zot, a command-line Zotero client

The last hour challenge was fun, but it was also a dismal failure - honestly, I had been envisioning nanote for a long time prior to developing it, and an hour was just not enough time to build in all the functionality I wanted. I've started using nanote in place of nano and have continued to build in additional functionality, and will probably continue to do so for a while. End result: I now understand how to write a program with the curses library, and my notes are much more organized than they were a week ago.

I use Zotero all the time to manage papers and books. Today I'll be developing a command line interface to Zotero. (There's not already one of these? Really?)

I'll be using the pygnotero library to interface with Zotero. To avoid the GPL, I'm not going to use pygnotero - instead, I'll just interface directly with Zotero's sqlite database. And, for fun, I'll use SQLAlchemy, which I've never used and should really learn more about. I want my client to be able to search (by author, title, citation, tags, etc.), add notes to papers, and output bibliographies (and potentially the text from PDF articles using pdfminer? I'm going to keep thinking about this.) It'll be called zot - short, memorable names for command line tools are always a good thing. I'm going to design it to pipe output to itself, i.e. "zot search ecoinformatics | zot bibliography" to generate a bibliography for all articles on ecoinformatics.

I'll begin sketching out planned functionality while I eat lunch at 12:00 (eastern time), start coding at 1:00 and hope to be finished no later than 2:00. Code will be available at https://github.com/hourchallenge/zot. The final result will be available on the Python Package Index as soon as it's relatively functional.

Update (2:00): my command line client can currently search for articles by title, author, or publication. I'm going to go for another hour to see if I can finish up.

Update (3:00): after two hours, I'm calling this finished. To try it out:

    pip install zot
    zot path /path/to/your/Zotero/directory/
    zot search --author Brown | zot bib