cobib 2.4.1

Console Bibliography

CoBib

Quickstart

Welcome to CoBib - the Console Bibliography! I have started this project when I was looking into alternatives to popular reference managers such as Mendeley, which has more features than I use on a regular basis and does not allow me to work from the command line which is where I spent most of the time that I spent on the computer.

Hence, I have decided to make it my own task of implementing a simple, yet fast, reference manager. CoBib is written in Python and uses a YAML file to store its bibliography in a plain text format.

Currently CoBib provides the following functionality:

• adding new references from a bibtex source or via DOI or arXiv ID
• querying the database by in- and exclusion filters
• printing detailed information about a reference ID
• exporting a list of references to the biblatex format
• opening associated files using an external program
• manually editing entries using the $EDITOR
• and general database inspection/modification via a curses-based TUI

Installation

You can either install CoBib via pip: pip3 install cobib or you can download the source code and install it manually:

git clone https://gitlab.com/mrossinek/cobib
cd cobib
make install

The advantage of the latter is that the crude Zsh completion and man page are installed, too. When installing via pip, you can download these separately from the source code repository and follow the commands of make install_extras to install them under their respective paths.

This will install the cobib package. By default, cobib will store your database at ~/.local/share/cobib/literature.yaml

To see how you can change this, see Config.

Windows

Please note that Windows is not supported! This is due to the fact that Python under Windows does not ship with the curses module.

However, if you are using Windows 10 you should be able to install and use CoBib within the Linux subsystem.

Usage

Start by initializing the database with

cobib init

Afterwards you can simply run cobib to start the TUI. If you prefer full control from the command line you can also run all commands directly via the CLI. Available commands are add, list, edit, remove, show, open and export. Type cobib --help for further information or cobib <subcommand> --help for more detailed information on the specific subcommands.

Note: when adding data from a .bib file, make sure that it is in the BibLaTex format!

You can also find more information in the man page.

Config

You can overwrite the default configuration by placing a config.ini file at ~/.config/cobib/. Take a look at the example config to see what possible configuration options exist.

You may also specify a different config file at runtime by using the -c or --config command line argument.

You can also find more information in the man page.