Keeping up with the latest developments in one’s field of research is becoming increasingly challenging. New articles are published daily across numerous journals, and preprint repositories—most notably arXiv—further adding to the overwhelming volume of new information. Staying informed, however, remains essential.

In this blog post, I will share my workflow for staying up to date with the latest publications as they are released, minimizing the risk of missing important research. This approach is highly personalized and may not suit everyone, but I hope readers can find valuable insights to incorporate into their own routines.

🔔 Google Scholar Alerts

Google Scholar is the go-to resource for searching articles on specific topics, tracking an author’s publications, and—if you are so inclined—checking your standing in the academic world through various debatable impact metrics.

Most researchers are aware that Google Scholar allows users to set up alerts for new publications based on search terms. This feature periodically sends email notifications with recent papers matching the specified query. However, keep in mind that Google Scholar scans for the search term anywhere in a publication, not just in the title. As a result, you may receive a high volume of loosely related papers that merely mention the term. To minimize this noise, I recommend keeping these alerts limited to highly specific search terms.

Another useful feature is setting up alerts based on an author’s name. If an author has a Google Scholar profile, you can easily follow them by clicking the Follow button in the top right corner of their profile.

If a researcher does not have a Google Scholar profile, you can still track their publications by setting up an alert for their name.

However, despite how it appears, following an author does not always guarantee that you will receive updates solely on their work. Publications from researchers with identical names are sometimes mistakenly included in the alerts.

📩 Organizing Email Alerts

Once you have set up alerts for key topics and researchers, your inbox can quickly become cluttered with notifications from Google Scholar—especially if you have created numerous alerts. To keep things organized, I use email filters to automatically categorize these messages based on custom criteria.

In Gmail, I filter all emails from Google Scholar alerts (identified by the email address scholaralerts-noreply@google.com) and move them out of my inbox into a dedicated label, in my case .Google Scholar. Since Gmail sorts labels alphabetically, as a personal convention, I prefix all my custom labels with a period (.), which insures that they are grouped together at the top of the Labels section in the sidebar menu.

⚠️ Downsides of Google Scholar Alerts

As mentioned earlier, relying solely on Google Scholar alerts to stay updated on research developments has its drawbacks. The system presents a trade-off: subscribing to a broad range of queries results in an overwhelming flood of non-relevant publications, while limiting alerts increases the risk of missing important papers.

Google Scholar’s alerts are also not always precise with authors with common names often being misattributed. Furthermore, since Google Scholar relies on web crawlers to index new publications, there is typically a delay of several days or even weeks before a newly released paper appears in search results.

While Google Scholar alerts can be a useful tool, they are best used in combination with other strategies to ensure timely and relevant updates.

📖 Tracking New Publications from Specific Journals

A highly effective way to stay updated on research is by following the latest articles published in key journals relevant to your field. This method complements the broader search capabilities of Google Scholar and often helps me discover important papers well before Google Scholar notifies me of them.

📡 RSS Feeds

While you could manually bookmark your favorite journals and check their homepages every morning, a far more efficient approach is to use RSS feeds to gather all this information in one place.

“What are RSS feeds?”, you may wonder. Perhaps, you have come across this logo in the corner of some websites:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a long-standing technology, first introduced in 1999, that allows websites to distribute content in a standardized, machine-readable format. Websites with RSS feeds publish updates containing headlines, summaries, and links to full articles. In fact, RSS is the backbone of podcast distribution as well.

With RSS, you can stay updated on new publications without visiting each journal’s website individually since most academic journals provide RSS feeds for their latest articles. Thankfully, this is also the case for arXiv, where you can subscribe to specific research areas, such as Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph). More information on accessing specific arXiv RSS feeds are detailed here.

The quality of RSS feeds varies from journal to journal, but most include a table of contents (TOC) image, article title, abstract, and author list. Typically, this information is sufficient to assess whether a paper is relevant to your research.

📲 The Feeder App Reader

There are many RSS reader options available, but I highly recommend the open-source Feeder app for Android. It is ad-free, features a clean UI with a native dark mode, and offers extensive customization options for tailoring the interface to your preferences.

Feeder displays the TOC image alongside the article title, and selecting an article will (depending on the RSS feed) also show the author list and abstract.

If the article is open-access, Feeder can even fetch the entire article such that you can read directly from the app.

The app allows you to group feeds by tags, making it easy to categorize subscriptions by topic. You can also star articles to save them for later reading. The app is actively maintained—I personally reached out to the developer with a feature request and received helpful support.

I use Feeder as part of my morning routine to monitor key journals as well as my favorite blogs—a list of which you can find on my Resources page.

📚 Zotero Integration

As a side note, if you are already using Zotero to manage your research papers, you will be happy to know that it has built-in RSS support, making it even easier to track and organize important publications.

🔍 Wrapping Up

Staying on top of the latest research can feel overwhelming, but with the right tools and strategies, it becomes much more manageable. Personally, I have found that RSS feeds for relevant journals and Google Scholar for broad searches provide complementary approaches for keeping track of the latest publications.

I have been looking for a way of accessing my WhatsApp conversations from my Linux desktop. Unfortunately, no native Linux application has been developed, so I thought my only option was the WhatsApp web UI. The web interface, however, has been quite buggy and exhibits poor performance. Moreover, since I prevent cookies in my web browser, not only do I need to login every time with the QR code (which is a pain) but rejecting cookies also seems to interfere with the login process, preventing me entirely from loging in.

In my search for an alternative that also supports the Linux operating system, I stumbled upon the open-source Franz program, hosted on GitHub. It provides an interface to all the common chat services in one place, including WhatsApp, which works great! However, Franz relies on a fremium business model, which limits the number of services that free-tier uses can use at one time and prevents the login of self-hosted chats, such as Zulip of Mattermost. This was quite inconvenient as I rely on them for work communications.

Ferdium

I was delighted to find out that there is a fully free and open-source fork of Franz called Ferdium, which removes all of its restrictions. It provides access to huge selection of messaging services from one place—many of which I have never even heard of.

In addition, it provides a slew of convenient keyboard shortcuts for navigating between the various services and contains various productivity features, such as integrated TODO lists to keep track of tasks. Best of all, since it is built using the Electron framework, it is platform-agnostic and runs on Windows, Mac and, yes, Linux.

Conclusion

Ferdium has been a game-changer for managing my messaging services across platforms. With Ferdium, I could say goodbye to the seemingly endlessly increasing number of chat service apps that I had downloaded on all my devices. If you are also overwhelmed by all these different messaging services, Ferdium might be the right tool for you!

Has years of staring, in a dimly lit room, at a dark mode terminal or text editor made you no longer accustomed to the blinding white pages of most applications? While many programs, such as email readers, come with a good native dark mode, some of the most common file formats including HTML web pages and PDFs are usually displayed using their default white background color.

In this blog post, we discuss methods of viewing these file formats with an appearance that is more pleasant on the eye.

Browser

Web Pages

For the browser, there is a neat extension called Dark Reader which dynamically modifies the CSS of the webpage in order to render it in dark mode. The extension is available on both Firefox and Chromium-based web browsers. It also comes with a slew of customization options, ranging from selectively disabling the extension on certain web pages that you would rather render in their native appearance, to custom filters, which determine how the CSS is modified.

Below, you can find two examples of the extension in action. It works both on static web pages, such as Wikipedia, and dynamic ones like Google Maps.

PDFs

Note that web browsers often block extensions from functioning on protected URLs, such as configuration pages and local files (e.g., PDFs). Therefore, if you use your web browser as your PDF viewer, you will not be able to rely on Dark Reader for providing a pleasant reading experience.

There is, however, a workaround for Firefox users. Create a custom bookmark with a URL given by the following javascript code (adapted from this StackOverflow post):

javascript:(function(){var el = typeof viewer !== 'undefined' ? viewer : document.body; el.style.filter = 'invert(1) contrast(75%)';})()

While viewing a PDF in Firefox, clicking on this bookmark will invert the colors of the PDF and decrease the contrast such that it is lighter on the eyes – effectively performing a poor man’s dark mode.

PDF viewer

For a better dark mode experience with PDFs, I would recommend using a dedicated PDF viewer which has a native dark mode option. If you are comfortable with Vim motions, there are two great options, the well-established Zathura program and the newer feature-rich Sioyek reader, which provide a dark mode out of the box.

Warning

These PDF readers heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts, in particular Vim motions, and might not be appropriate for novices.

While I am content with Sioyek’s default dark mode, the one from Zathura simply inverts the colors which makes for an aggressive appearance since the white background is turned into pitch black. Therefore, I prefer setting the colors to a more tamed dark blue color (similar to the Nord colorscheme). This can be achieved by adding the following configuration to the Zathura config file:

set default-bg          "#282a36" # Background
set default-fg          "#f8f8f2" # Foreground
set recolor-lightcolor  "#282a36" # Background
set recolor-darkcolor   "#f8f8f2" # Foreground

Zotero

If you spend a lot of time reading academic publications using the Zotero reference manager, you will be happy to hear that it can also be configured with dark mode functionality. The recent release of Zotero 7 now incorporates native support for dark mode. However, similar to the default dark mode of Zathura, it essentially just inverts the colors leading to a harsh visual experience. Thankfully, there is a plugin called zotero-night (compatible with Zotero 6), which provides a much more muted colorscheme and is, therefore, my preferred method of choice.

This article follows up on my previous blog post on improving the experience of digging through the documentation of command line interface tools. In that article, I detailed my preferred method for fetching documentation using the cheat.sh website.

This method, however, requires an internet connection. What if Microsoft decides to do another automatic software update, during the night, and crashes the worldwide web, again (looking at you CrowdStrike)? This would leave the rest of humanity with only the man pages to piece together all of human knowledge. Could we not make the experience of interacting with the man pages a bit more pleasant? That will be the goal of this article.

Manpager

Did you know that you can choose the application that is used for displaying the man pages? By default, it is set to the less pager, which doesn’t provide the best user experience due to its lack of proper syntax highlighting. The environment variable MANPAGER defines the program used for viewing the man pages.

bat

My favorite alternative to less is the bat program. It is part of series of common GNU CLI tools that have been rewritten in Rust, and often extended with additional functionality. This list includes bat as a drop-in replacement for cat and less, fd for find and ripgrep for grep. bat provides syntax highlighting for most programming languages and has even replaced cat and less for me entirely:

alias less="bat"
alias cat="bat -pp"

By default, bat acts like a pager similar to less. The -pp flag disables the paging option and prints the entire file, making bat function exactly like cat.

Moreover, it can be used as the MANPAGER with the following command taken from their README

export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"

Check out the results:

On my Mac, this command worked out of the box. However, on my Linux machine I was encountering formatting issues due to lingering color codes in the output (e.g., 1mgrep). From the bat documentation, this issue can be resolved by setting the following environment variable export MANROFFOPT="-c"

Neovim

Alternatively, you can use neovim as your MANPAGER which will even respect your color scheme

export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'

However, since it also loads all of your plugins (unless you were diligent in setting up lazy loading of packages), it will necessarily be a bit slower than bat, which is why I use it instead.

Source

I was made aware of the MANPAGER environment variable by this video from DistroTube. Go check him out, he makes great Linux related content!

Do you often find yourself forgetting common flags for command line interface (CLI) tools? Do you wonder if there are certain use cases of terminal utilities that you, perhaps, haven’t even thought of? While most programs contain extensive documentation in their man pages, I think that it is fair to say that this format is not always the easiest to navigate and can be quite dense.

cheat.sh

In comes cheat.sh (or cht.sh for short), a website that hosts a community-driven set of cheat sheets for most programming languages, tools and utilities. The best part is that it is designed to work seamlessly from the terminal using the curl command which is available on most systems by default, so all you really need is an internet connection. The cht.sh homepage serves as a tutorial on how to use the repository and exposes its capabilities:

$ curl cht.sh
      _                _         _    __
  ___| |__   ___  __ _| |_   ___| |__ \ \      The only cheat sheet you need
 / __| '_ \ / _ \/ _` | __| / __| '_ \ \ \     Unified access to the best
| (__| | | |  __/ (_| | |_ _\__ \ | | |/ /     community driven documentation
 \___|_| |_|\___|\__,_|\__(_)___/_| |_/_/      repositories of the world

+------------------------+ +------------------------+ +------------------------+
| $ curl cheat.sh/ls     | | $ cht.sh btrfs         | | $ cht.sh lua/:learn    |
| $ curl cht.sh/btrfs    | | $ cht.sh tar~list      | | Learn any* programming |
| $ curl cht.sh/tar~list | |                        | | language not leaving   |
| $ curl https://cht.sh  | |                        | | your shell             |
|                        | |                        | | *) any of 60           |
|                        | |                        | |                        |
+-- queries with curl ---+ +- own optional client --+ +- learn, learn, learn! -+
+------------------------+ +------------------------+ +------------------------+
| $ cht.sh go/f<tab><tab>| | $ cht.sh --shell       | | $ cht.sh go zip lists  |
| go/for   go/func       | | cht.sh> help           | | Ask any question using |
| $ cht.sh go/for        | | ...                    | | cht.sh or curl cht.sh: |
| ...                    | |                        | | /go/zip+lists          |
|                        | |                        | | (use /,+ when curling) |
|                        | |                        | |                        |
+---- TAB-completion ----+ +-- interactive shell ---+ +- programming questions-+
+------------------------+ +------------------------+ +------------------------+
| $ curl cht.sh/:help    | | $ vim prg.py           | | $ time curl cht.sh/    |
| see /:help and /:intro | | ...                    | | ...                    |
| for usage information  | | zip lists _            | | real    0m0.075s       |
| and README.md on GitHub| | <leader>KK             | |                        |
| for the details        | |             *awesome*  | |                        |
|            *start here*| |                        | |                        |
+--- self-documented ----+ +- queries from editor! -+ +---- instant answers ---+

[Follow @igor_chubin for updates][github.com/chubin/cheat.sh]

Example with grep

For instance, if you want to see which flag to pass to grep in order to filter all lines in a file that don’t contain a specific search query, you could consult the cheat sheet for grep:

$ curl cht.sh/grep
# To search a file for a pattern:
grep <pattern> <file>

# To perform a case-insensitive search (with line numbers):
grep -in <pattern> <file>

# To recursively grep for string <pattern> in <dir>:
grep -R <pattern> <dir>

# Read search patterns from a file (one per line):
grep -f <pattern-file> <file>

# Find lines NOT containing pattern:
grep -v <pattern> <file>

# Set how many lines to show before (-B) and after (-A) pattern:
grep -B 3 -A 2 <pattern> <file>

# To grep with regular expressions:
grep "^00" <file>                                               # Match lines starting with 00
grep -E "[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}" <file> # Find IP add

# To find all files that match <pattern> in <dir>
grep -rnw <dir> -e <pattern>

# To exclude grep from your grepped output of ps:
# (Add [] to the first letter. Ex: sshd -> [s]shd)
ps aux | grep '[h]ttpd'

# Colour in red {bash} and keep all other lines
ps aux | grep -E --color 'bash|$'

# (...)

The cheat sheet only lists the most common commands and doesn’t overwhelm the user with every single available option and flag. For our example, the fifth line from the above excerpt of the grep cheat sheet tells us that the -v flag is what we are looking for.

Note that, while I mostly use cht.sh for quickly finding flags of CLI tools, this is only scratching the surface of what this resource has to offer. For instance, it has an extensive interface for learning programming languages, which can be quite useful. I encourage the interested reader to consult the cht.sh documentation for further use cases.

Combining it with fzf

What would be quite neat is to be able to explore the available cheat sheets and dynamically select the desired one and preview it. For this purpose, I wrote a short script to combine the results from cht.sh with the popular fzf fuzzy finder command line tool.

First, to obtain all available cheat sheets hosted on cht.sh, we can use the :list query. This returns a list of all available cheat sheets, which can then be piped to fzf in order to fuzzy search through the results. The currently selected item’s cheat sheet may be queried from cht.sh and displayed in fzf’s preview window.

All this can be simply achieved using a short command which I aliased to chtsh for convenience:

alias chtsh="curl -s cht.sh/:list | fzf --preview 'curl -s cht.sh/{}'"

Note that the -s silences the progress bar of the curl command such that it is not overlaid on top of the fzf window. As shown in the above demo, the preview window maintains the syntax highlighting from the curl command and is fully scrollable.

fzf configuration

fzf has a number of customization options that can be used to tweak its appearance and workflow to your liking. These configurations can be either passed as flags to the fzf command or set globally in the environment variable FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS. I use this variable to configure the location and size of the preview window as well as enable vim keybindings for scrolling the preview window (e.g., <C-u>: up, <C-d>: down):

export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS="--preview-window=right,80%:wrap \
     --bind ctrl-y:preview-up,ctrl-e:preview-down,ctrl-u:preview-half-page-up,ctrl-d:preview-half-page-down"

Source

This inspiration for this post comes from a great YouTube video by ThePrimeagen, which also introduced me to the cht.sh resource. In the video, he develops a short script which combines cht.sh and fzf with tmux. Actually, if you are an avid tmux user, his scripts can be adapted to my command for a truly smooth experience using the cht.sh facilities.

Nowadays, most of the time when I use a search engine, I usually know on which website I want to arrive at, but I don’t know the exact URL. For instance, if I want to learn more about the 17th century Dutch Tulip Mania, I would usually start by checking out its Wikipedia page. Indeed, I would use “tulip mania wiki” as my search query and click on the first link (corresponding to the Wikipedia page). This process is pretty annoying, especially now that one needs to click through all the cookie menus when using Google as the search engine.

Solution

Since this is how I use search engines 99% of the time, wouldn’t it be nice if I could directly search the website, for instance Wikipedia, for the query, in this case “tulip mania”? One of the coolest native features of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-centric search engine, which is lesser known (at least it was to me) is called DuckDuckGo bangs which enables precisely this. By starting a search query with a bang (an exclamation point) followed by a character code, corresponding to the website, and then the search query, DuckDuckGo directly issues the query to the website of interest and the user is immediately redirected to the page they were looking for. In our previous example, one would need to use the character code w corresponding to Wikipedia:

!w tulip mania

Available Bangs

DuckDuckGo Bangs supports a huge number of websites (13’567 as of the time of writing this blog post) containing all the major websites as well as many lesser known ones. The list of available bangs can be viewed on their website, and you can even make a suggestion for websites that have not been cataloged yet. Furthermore, if you simply use a bang followed by your search query without any character code, DuckDuckGo redirects you to the first search result (reminiscent of the “I’m feeling lucky” feature of Google). I use this all the time for lesser known websites that do not have their dedicated bang. In addition, this feature can be used when a bang opens up the search results page of the target website (instead of the closest match) to directly jump to the desired page (as in the case of Google Scholar in the last example form the video above).

Most used bangs

Here are a some of my most used bangs:

Compatibility with other search engines

Now you might say, this looks cool and all but I don’t want to switch my entire search engine to DuckDuckGo because the search results are not as good as the ones from Google, with which I would totally agree. Personally, I prefer using a search engine called StartPage which fetches results from Google without tracking everything you do on the internet. Does this mean that you cannot benefit from this cool feature? Far from it. There are a number of plugins for Firefox and Chromium-based web browser plugins which augment your search bar with this feature while still relying on your search engine of choice for default queries. The plugin that I am currently using is Banger for Firefox, with which I am quite happy. However, there are a number of alternatives that are available by simply searching for “bangs” in the respective browser’s extension store.

Mobile

On mobile, I use the Yang! Yet Another Bangs extension for the android Firefox app.