Indexa

Auto-rename downloaded academic PDFs using a canonical filename format:

FirstAuthor-ShortTitle-Year.pdf

Why we built this

This came from a very real pain point @Tharusha-W kept running into while downloading and organizing academic papers for research:

“Why do I have to type this out every single time? There has to be a more efficient way.”

Short filenames like FirstAuthor et al. (Year) are fast in the moment, but later you end up reopening files just to find the exact title when you want to share them.

Adding full titles helps, but then every download turns into another tiny manual task.
And yeah… ain’t nobody got time for that.

That constant friction is exactly why Indexa exists:
download PDF → auto-name it cleanly → move on.

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Download (Windows)

Get the latest release here:

https://github.com/wicksense/indexa/releases

Download one of these:

• Indexa-Setup.exe → installable app (recommended for most users)
• Indexa-windows-portable.zip → portable version (no install)

Quick usage (GUI)

1. Open Indexa
2. Pick your folder
3. Click Preview Scan
4. If good, click Apply Scan
5. (Optional) click Start Watch to auto-handle incoming PDFs

GUI includes:

• folder picker
• preview/apply scan
• preview/apply undo
• start/stop watch mode
• system tray support (minimize to tray)
• Launch on startup toggle (Windows)
• simple filename style presets + advanced custom template
• title spacing options (compact / spaces / underscore)
• title casing options (original / sentence / lower / title)

GUI screenshots

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What it does

• Scans a folder for PDFs
• Extracts metadata from PDF content (not from original filename)
• DOI/Crossref + arXiv lookup support
• Renames files safely (collision-aware)
• Supports dry-run mode
• Writes an undo log for applied renames

Filename rule

Default template:

{first_author_last}-{short_title}-{year}.pdf

Template tokens:

• {first_author_last}
• {short_title}
• {year}

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CLI (advanced)

Scan once

python -m indexa.cli scan <folder> --dry-run
python -m indexa.cli scan <folder> --apply
python -m indexa.cli scan <folder> --apply --title-spacing spaces --title-case sentence

Watch folder continuously

python -m indexa.cli watch <folder> --apply

Uses event-driven file watching (watchdog) when available, with fallback polling.

Undo renames

python -m indexa.cli undo <folder> --dry-run
python -m indexa.cli undo <folder> --steps 5 --apply
python -m indexa.cli undo <folder> --apply

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Developer setup

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m indexa.gui