CatcherInArxiv

CLI tool that searches arXiv for recent papers matching your research topics.

Install

Requires Python >= 3.9. No third-party dependencies.

pip install .

Usage

Inline topics

arxivcatcher --topic "large language models" --topic "reinforcement learning"

Topics from file

By default, topics are read from ~/.config/arxivcatcher/topics.txt:

# first time setup
mkdir -p ~/.config/arxivcatcher
cp topics.example.txt ~/.config/arxivcatcher/topics.txt

# then just run
arxivcatcher

Or point to a specific file:

arxivcatcher --topics-by-path ~/path/to/topics.txt

Output modes

By default results print to stdout. Use --output-dir to write article files instead:

arxivcatcher --topic "transformers" --output-dir ./results

Files are written under <output-dir>/<date>/<topic>/.

Options

--topic TOPIC        Search topic (repeatable)
--topics-by-path F   Path to a topics file (default: ~/.config/arxivcatcher/topics.txt)
--output-dir DIR     Write files instead of printing to stdout
--days N             Only include papers from the last N days (default: 1)
--max-results N      Max arXiv API results per topic (default: 100)
-v, --verbose        Show full summaries in stdout mode
-q, --quiet          Suppress status messages on stderr
--version            Show version and exit

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	No results found
2	Bad input (missing file, empty topics)
3	Network error