litman 1.3.3

Added

• Add a paper by dragging its PDF into the window. litman reads the DOI off the first pages and shows you what it found — title, authors, year, journal — before anything is saved; correct or type the DOI yourself when the PDF has none, as scanned papers often do. A DOI already in your library is refused with a link to the paper you already have. When CrossRef has no record for it — a patent, or a journal that registers its DOIs elsewhere — fill in the title, year and authors yourself and it goes in the same way; a DOI you typed is kept even though CrossRef could not resolve it. The paper id is shown before anything is written, and when litman cannot name it on its own the field opens into the three parts an id is made of — year, first author, keyword — with the parts it worked out already filled in and only the missing one waiting for you. A Chinese-titled paper therefore costs you one box, not the whole id. The drop is a copy, and the dialog says so: your original file stays where it is, unlike lit add, which moves the PDF it imports. This is otherwise the same import the CLI runs, so a dragged-in paper is indistinguishable from one added there.
• litman now tells you what changed after an update. The first time the app opens on a new version, a short "What's new" card lists the handful of changes you will actually notice, with a link to this changelog for the rest; click the litman mark in the top-left corner to read it again later. The card's text ships inside the package, so it needs no network and a fresh install never sees it — there is no previous version to tell it about.
• Pin papers to the top of the list. Papers you are actively working with can be pinned: they gather in a "Pinned" group at the top of the browse panel and stay there, instead of drifting as the reading list re-ranks itself. Pin from the row (the pin icon, or P on the selected paper), and unpin to send a paper back to its usual place. Pins survive closing and reopening litman, and each library keeps its own.
• lit health-check reports papers whose author or title is a placeholder. Papers imported with a filler value — Unknown, N/A, untitled — used to pass every check, because the field was technically filled in. They are now listed by name, each with the lit modify command that writes the real value — and, when the filler reached the paper's id as well, the lit rename that clears it from there.
• lit health-check reports papers whose id says nothing about them. An id like 2018_Zhang_A — the keyword reduced to a single stray letter — is listed with the lit rename that replaces it. Only papers whose title cannot produce a better keyword are reported, so an id you chose yourself is left alone.
• lit health-check reports placeholders left inside a paper id. A paper imported as 2024_Unknown_Untitled keeps that name after you correct its author and title — the id is the folder name, the target of every [[link]] in your notes, and the cite key in exported BibTeX, and only lit rename changes it. It is now listed on its own, so correcting the fields no longer makes the last mention of the bad id disappear along with them. Once the fields are right the report hands you the complete rename, both ids filled in; when the title is in a script that cannot produce a keyword, it fills in everything it can and leaves that one blank for you.
• lit health-check --all. Each category now lists its first few findings and folds the rest into a count — a library imported before a guard existed can hold hundreds of one kind, and printing every one buries everything else. The counts stay exact; --all prints the full list, which is what to use when working through a category paper by paper.
• Patents export as patents. A paper with venue-type: patent now becomes a @patent entry instead of a bare @misc, and a patent-number field is rendered as the entry's number.
• Edit metadata in the GUI. The selected paper's panel has an Edit button: title, year, journal, DOI, volume/issue/pages, publisher, venue type, book title — and the author list, where authors can be renamed, added, removed and reordered (drag the handle, or the ↑/↓ buttons). One Save writes everything in a single transaction through the same validated path the CLI uses; if something is rejected — a DOI another paper already carries, a non-numeric year — the dialog shows the reason and keeps your input. The paper id is not editable here: changing it is a rename that updates every reference, which remains lit rename's job.
• lit modify --set-author rewrites the author list in order. Repeat the flag once per author; the order the flags appear in is the order stored. This is the way to reorder authors or correct a name in place — --add-tag appends to the end of the list, so it cannot express either.

Changed

• Deleting, restoring, re-tagging and project-linking papers is now fast in large libraries. These operations used to re-read every paper's metadata from disk — several times each — so in a 4,000-paper library one click in the GUI could stall for seconds. They now reuse the library's index and update only what actually changed, making their cost independent of library size; the same atomic write path and the same on-disk results as before, just without the re-reading. Editing a paper's title or authors in the GUI got the same treatment when the paper belongs to a project.
• YAML parsing is C-accelerated. litman now installs ruamel.yaml.clib, which recent versions of the YAML library stopped bundling — full-library operations such as lit health-check read metadata roughly 3–4× faster.
• A paper can no longer be imported with a placeholder title or first author. lit add --from-llm-json refuses values like Unknown, N/A or untitled in the two places that become part of the paper id, and explains what to write instead. This will interrupt an agent that used to fill those in — which is the point: an id is permanent short of renaming the paper and every reference to it. When a work has no personal author, name the issuing body — the patent assignee, the journal, the organisation. When it is genuinely unattributed, write Anonymous. A filler further down the author list still comes in, since it never reaches the id; the import warns and says how to correct it. Metadata fetched by DOI is unaffected, and lit modify still lets you write anything you like into your own library.

Fixed

• A title written in a script the id cannot carry no longer produces a nonsense id. Paper ids are ASCII, because they are folder names on Windows, macOS and Linux alike — and litman picked the keyword by splitting the title on spaces. A Chinese, Japanese or Korean title has none, so the whole title arrived as one word and was reduced to whatever Latin characters happened to sit inside it: 关于化合物A的合成方法 became 2018_Zhang_A, silently, and short of renaming the paper that id was permanent. Such a title is now refused instead, and the message names the --id that gets past it, offering a candidate whenever the title held a usable fragment. Nothing about the stored metadata changed — titles, authors and journals in any script are kept exactly as written, and only the id is ASCII. Write the first author's family name in romanised form and the rest can stay in its own script.
• The "no year" error no longer reads as an invitation to guess one. When imported metadata carried no publication year, the message asked for an id and left the rest open, and the quickest way past it was to put the download year in — which then passed every later check and surfaced only as a wrong date in an exported citation. It now says outright that the year must not be guessed, and where to find the real one.
• The two places you can type a year now ask for the same thing. The add dialog took three or four digits; the metadata editor checked nothing at all and left it to the backend, which only requires a whole number. A library could therefore end up holding both 145 and 12311, each arrived at through a different door. Both now want four digits, and both print that rule beside the field before you type rather than only greying out the button afterwards — a control that goes grey without saying why sends you looking for the mistake in the wrong place. Four digits rather than a plausible range: a range has to decide where the future ends, and preprints routinely carry next year's date. The editor judges only a year you actually changed, so a paper that already holds a wrong one can still have its title corrected, and lit modify still writes whatever you tell it to.
• Starting litman from its icon now finds the AI agents you have installed. On Linux and macOS an app started from a desktop shortcut or the Dock is handed a shorter search path than a terminal window gets, and every agent CLI lives outside it — so litman reported Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and Antigravity as all missing at once, Recheck kept saying the same, and the skills could not be installed. It now looks in the places those tools actually install to, so double-clicking the icon and running lit gui in a terminal see the same agents. Installing an agent while litman is open still needs only Recheck, not a restart.
• Microsoft Edge on Linux is recognised as a window browser. litman opens its own window when it finds a Chrome-family browser, and Edge's Linux package was only matched by chance. Installing Edge — or Chrome, or Chromium — now reliably gets you a standalone window instead of a browser tab. A browser installed under your home directory is found too.
• A snap-packaged Chromium now opens litman's own window. On Ubuntu, installing Chromium gets you a snap, and a snap is not allowed to reach hidden directories under your home — including the one litman kept its browser profile in. Chromium will not run a profile it cannot lock, so it quit the moment it started: the desktop shortcut showed nothing at all, and installing a browser left you worse off than having none. A snap-packaged browser now keeps its profile in the area snapd grants it, and the shortcut opens a standalone window as it does everywhere else. Every other browser — Windows, macOS, and a Chromium installed from a .deb — keeps the location it has always used, and lit uninstall clears both.
• A browser that quits on startup no longer takes litman with it. The window launcher read "the browser is gone and no page ever connected" as proof that the launch had failed, and shut the server down — correct when the browser never came up, but it also caught a browser that started and then gave up, leaving nothing on screen at all. litman now opens the page in your usual browser instead, so a window that cannot be had degrades to a tab rather than to nothing. A browser that exits cleanly is left alone: it has handed the page to a window you already had open, and a tab appearing on top of that would be a surprise rather than a rescue. A launch that failed also no longer waits out the patience meant for a slow one.