Adding PDFs to Papers2 with maid

Often, when processing journal RSS feeds, I’ll find quite a few articles that I want to read. I use Papers2 to manage my papers, so the first thing I need to do is import these newly-downloaded files.

The maid gem makes this easy to do automatically. I’ve added the following rule to my rules.rb file:

rule 'Add PDFs to Papers2' do
  dir('~/Downloads/*.pdf').each do |path|
    is_paper = `mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads/ computing`

      if is_paper.include?(path)
        `open -a Papers2 "#{path}"`
      end
  end
end

It’s not perfect, but it is perfectly functional. Every time I run maid clean, any PDFs that contain the word “computing” will be automatically imported into Papers. Obviously the word used to select papers will vary depending on your field, but the rule is trivial to modify.