This is a python script to nicely present arxiv news feed. I use it together with the mutt email reader. It is written using the ncurses library :). It highlights titles whihc are written by $ARXIV_AUTHORS or ones that matches a pattern. It can also fetch abstracts, pdfs or just open the link in your $BROWSER.

Add to ~/.muttrc file the following snippet:

macro index,pager X "<pipe-message>arxiv_reader.py<enter>Wo" "parse message through arxive_reader.py"

Then when you are over email fro arxiv type X and the scritp will parse the email and list all the titles.

You should also set the $BROWSER environment variable, $PDFREADER. Or just change the $BROWSER and $PDFREADER variables in the script directly. You should also change the $DOWNLOADDIR variable. By default it is set to $HOME/downloads and if does not exist it is reset to /tmp.

Go up and down with j and k keys (or the arrow keys). Hit enter (or <space>, or a) to read the abstract. If it was not included in the email it will be downloaded from the arxiv web page. If you hit u the paper's url will be opened using your $BROWSER. You can also save an entry to database: with s, or delete it with d (sqlite3 database placed in $HOME/.arxiv.db). The g key will get/download the most recent version of the paper and O will open the file in $PDFREADER.

Press q to close the abstract window or quit the reader.

If you define $ARXIV_AUTHORS environment variable titles of matching authors will be highlighted. $ARXIV_AUTHORS is a white space separated list of names.

It also hightlights the title if $ARXIV_ABSTRACT_PATTERN match the title or the abstract. $ARXIV_ABSTRACT_PATTERN is a Python pattern (can be written like r"" litterals).