papersman

papersman is a simple, minimalist tag-based manager for electronic documents, papers, etc. It's based on the following ideas:

1. Primary way to store document (meta)information is in human-readable structured format (subset of YAML), contained in files side-by-side with actual documents. Currently, papersman doesn't use any database. It may come as a way to cache metadata at later (much later) time, but on a typical modern system, just scanning YAML files should scale well to a few thousands of documents, which should be well enough for a personal collection.
2. Based on the above, the primary way to check and update metadata is with your text editor. papersman provides (or will provide) support commands for actions which aren't convenient/practical to do manually (e.g., rename a tag across all documents).
3. papersman uses hash of file contents to identify a file. This will allow to keep (or restore) document/metadata association across file rename of the original document.
4. For more advanced UI needs, papersman uses web browser as a frontend. And currently, it just generates static HTML files for per-tag document indexes, which you can use locally, send to anyone, or deploy to any web server. At later time, it's expected that a simple webapp for more advanced querying (e.g. boolean combinations of tags) will be written.

papersman is primarily developed and used with Pycopy, a minimalist Python dialect. Given that CPython is forward-compatible with Pycopy (by installing Pycopy API modules), it can also be used with CPython (or another Python implementation).

License

papersman is written and maintained by Paul Sokolovsky. It's available under the MIT license.