Note: As of 0.45 Gnotero has been renamed to Qnotero. Get Qnotero here.

Overview

• What is Gnotero?
  
• Download and installation
  
• Documentation
  
• A note on Mac OS compatibility
  
• Known issues
  
• Changelog
  
• Screenshots
  
• Support
  

What is Gnotero?

Gnotero is a Python Gtk application which provides access to your Zotero references. Zotero is an excellent open source reference manager, but it lacks a simple and direct way to access your references at the click of a button. That is why I created this simple program, which lives in the system tray and allows you to search through your references by Author and/ or Year of Publication. If a PDF file is attached to a reference you can open it directly from within Gnotero.

Freely available under the GNU General Public License v3.

Download and installation

Note: As of 0.45 Gnotero has been renamed to Qnotero. Get Qnotero here. The downloads below are for Gnotero 0.43, which is no longer maintained (but perfectly usable).

The current version is 0.43. Older versions can be found here. The Arch Linux package is courtesy of Thomas Jost.

Note: It has come to my attention that the dependency python-glade2 is missing from the Ubuntu/ Debian package. I will fix this shortly, but for now you can install this package using sudo apt-get install python-glade2.

Linux installation procedure

To install from source, extract the .tar.gz file somewhere and run the following command (as root) to install Gnotero. Please note that a local installation (python setup.py install --prefix=$HOME) of Gnotero currently doesn't work.

python setup.py install

To install Gnotero using the Ubuntu/ Debian installer, simply download the .deb file and double-click it. After you have installed Gnotero, you can start Gnotero from the menu(Accessories -> Gnotero) or by running

gnotero

Windows installation procedure

Download the Windows Binary .zip file and extract it to a location of your choice. You can start Gnotero by running.

gnotero.exe

Documentation

First run

If you start Gnotero for the first time you will have to locate Zotero. Gnotero can do this automatically or you can locate Zotero manually. If you are running Windows you will also have to locate Firefox and a PDF-reader (such as Acrobat Reader).

Searching

You can search for references by author, date, title, publication (journal) and collection. For example, if you want to search for all papers in Nature Neurscience from 2010 you type:

journal: "nat neurosci" year: 2010

The following keywords are recognized: "author", "journal", "publication" (= "journal"), "date", "year" (= "date"), "title" and "collection". Logical operators ("and"/ "or") are not supported.

Windows vs Linux version

Starting from version 0.40 there is a Windows version of Gnotero. It does not yet provide all the functionality of the Linux version (see below), but it should be usable. I have tested Gnotero on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. If you have any experiences (good or bad) running Gnotero on Windows 7 or Windows Vista, please let me know. There is no configuration tool for Gnotero on Windows, but you can manually edit (or remove to cause a 'reset') the configuration file (.gnotero) in your Home folder.

Automatic update checking

As of version 0.41 Gnotero automatically checks for updates on startup and presents a notification if a newer version is available. You can disable this feature by adding/ changing the following setting in your config file (.gnotero in your home directory).

check_updates = no

To check for updates Gnotero makes contact with cogsci.nl (http://www.cogsci.nl/software/gnotero/MOST_RECENT_VERSION.TXT). This contact is anonymous and is not logged (except for the general logging that my service provider does).

Gnoteroctrl (and how to create a Gnotero keyboard shortcut)

Gnoteroctrl is a simple console application that you can use to make the Gnotero window pop-up or automatically perform a search. In order to make Gnotero pop-up, simply execute (respectively for Linux and Windows) the following command while Gnotero is running:

gnoteroctrl -a
gnoteroctrl.exe -a

To perform a search execute something like:

gnoteroctrl -s "author: john doe"
gnoteroctrl.exe -s "author: john doe"

By binding a gnoteroctrl command to a keyboard shortcut you can create a keyboard shortcut for Gnotero (how you can create keyboard shortcuts depends on your platform). I noticed that sometimes Gnotero doesn't automatically receive the focus if you make it appear using Gnoteroctrl, which is annoying This is caused by focus-stealing prevention. Whether and how you can fix this depends on your system. If you are running Linux with Compiz (i.e., if you have pretty desktop effects etc.), you can disable it using the CompizConfig Settings Manager, by setting "General Options → Focus & Raise Behavior → Focus Prevention Level" to "Off".

Gnoteroconf (Linux only)

The linux version of Gnotero comes with a graphical configuration tool (gnoteroconf). You can open Gnoteroconf by right-clicking on the Gnotero panel-applet and selecting Gnoteroconf or by running:

gnoteroconf

Gnoterobrowse (Linux only)

Gnoterobrowse provides essentially the same functionality as Gnotero but is a standalone program (rather than a panel-applet). Gnoterobrowse allows you to easily copy attached PDFs from your Zotero library to any location and allows for browsing by collection. I chose to create a separate program, rather than extending the Gnotero panel applet, to keep Gnotero lightweight. You can open Gnoterobrowse by right-clicking on the Gnotero panel-applet and selecting Gnoterobrowse or by running:

gnoterobrowse

Gnote integration (Linux only)

I personally keep notes of articles in Gnote (the name has nothing to do with Gnotero, Gnote is a C-implementation of Tomboy notes). Gnotero can automatically search Gnote for a (section in a) note belonging to a specific article. If a note is found a note icon is presented if you hover over the article. You can open the note with a right click on the article (it doesn't jump to the right position within the note yet, this feature appears to be broken in Gnote). You also see a preview of the note in a tooltip if you hover the note icon. Gnotero expects each note to be preceded by a bold line containing at least the name of the first author and the year of publication within parentheses, like so:

Duhamel et al. (1992) Science 255

A note on Mac OS compatibility

There is no Gnotero package available for Mac OS. However, I suspect it is possible to get Gnotero running on Mac OS using the source code, provided that the required libraries are installed (notably GTK+ and PyGTK). If you have any experiences (good or bad) getting Gnotero to run on Mac OS, please let me know!

Known issues

• Sometimes the window appears at an odd position after you have switched desktops while Gnotero was visible.
• Gnotero does not handle special characters in path names gracefully, which may lead to errors if you have a) strange characters in filenames and (not or) b) link your attachments rather than store them in the Zotero folder.
• Gnotero only works with recent versions of Zotero (the 2.0 series). If you have any experiences with the Zotero 2.1 series (currently in beta), good or bad, please let me know.
• A local installation of Gnotero currently doesn't work (python setup.py install --prefix=$HOME).
• If you enable the monochrome icons, Gnotero may crash. This is because Gnotero installs additional icons which require the icon cache to be updated. You can fix this by running the following command (as root): gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor/

Changelog

See here.

Screenshots

Below you can see Gnotero 0.40 running on Ubuntu 10.04

Gnoterobrowse 0.40 running on Ubuntu 10.04

Gnotero 0.40 running on Windows XP

Support

There are a number of channels through which you can ask questions:

• The comment section below is a good place for brief comments/ simple questions.
• For (potentially) lengthy discussions, please use the cogsci forum or the Gnotero thread on the Zotero forums.