Journal Fabulous Club

jfc is an utility to make reviewing ArXiv papers for your Journal Club easier.

Install

Consider using pipx.

pipx install git+https://github.com/mikeevmm/jfc/

Otherwise, if you are using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/mikeevmm/jfc/

How to Use

jfc aggregates unseen articles from the specified timeframe (see the configuration section), and displays them to you in an interactive prompt. From the title, you can choose to read the abstract, and from there you can choose to open the ArXiv PDF.

Run jfc to get an interactive prompt.

Configuration

jfc has some configuration parameters, which are set in the TOML file that lives in the configuration directory (as reported by appdirs).

Running jfc config will output the full path of the configuration file. Since most editors accept a path as an argument for the file to open, this means you can quickly edit the configuration (in bash) with

<your favourite editor> $(jfc config)

To clean the configuration and/or article database, run one of

jfc clean conf
jfc clean db
jfc clean all

A copy of the old files is kept with a .old extension, so that these can be recovered. In particular, your old configuration can be recovered (in bash) with

mv "$(jfc config).old" "$(jfc config)"

Parameters

• span The timeframe of publication dates to aggregate, in days, and counting backwards from today. [Default: 7]
• show_header Whether to be boring (false) or not (true) [Default: true]
• show_date Whether to show the publication date of each entry [Default: true]
• browser_from_title Whether to have the option to open the article in the browser immediately from the title [Default: false]
• shuffle Whether to present the unread papers in a shuffled order (true), or in the order that they were indexed (false) [Default: true]
• [crosslists] Options relating to cross-lists.
  • highlight Indicate if a given entry is a cross-list [Default: false]
  • include Include cross-listed publications [Default: true]
• [categories] Set each item below it to true to include it in the ArXiv search. Every element defaults to false, except quant-ph, which defaults to true.
  • cs
  • econ
  • eess
  • math
  • astro-ph
  • cond-mat
  • gr-qc
  • hep-ex
  • hep-lat
  • hep-ph
  • hep-th
  • math-ph
  • nlin
  • nucl-ex
  • nucl-th
  • physics
  • quant-ph
  • q-bio
  • q-fin
  • stat
• [terminal] Options relating to the terminal look.
  • width the maximum width at which to wrap the text [Default: (terminal width)]

Debugging

Setting the environment variable JFC_DEBUG to 1 will give more information on crashes, if any is available.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Issues are not guaranteed to be addressed. jfc is built primarily for self-use, provided to you for free, and not my primary occupation. Please respect this.

Licence

jfc is licenced under a GNU General Public License, version 3. This informally means that:

You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to or software including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL along with build & install instructions.

You can find a copy of the licence under LICENCE.

Support

We're all poor students, so we know how this goes. Nonetheless, getting donations, no matter how small, lets me know that people use and appreciate the software I've published.

💕 If you like and use jfc, consider buying me a coffee.