Quick start
bibman is a simple tool to manage your bibliography in BibTeX format. It saves your entries in individual .bib files in your library. The tool automatically looks for a config file (.bibman.toml) in the current directory and its parent directories to find the location of your library, but you can override the search with the --location option. This means that you can manage multiple libraries in different directories. So you can manage references for different projects!
Initial setup
To get started first install the tool and then create a library with the following command:
bibman init
This will create a new directory and file:
./
├── .bibman.toml
└── references/
The .bibman.toml file is the configuration file for the library. It contains the path to the library and other settings. The references/ directory is where your .bib files will be stored.
Ideally you should not manually move or edit files in the references/ directory. Instead, use the bibman commands to manage your bibliography. In case you do any manual changes, you can always run bibman check library to check for any inconsistencies in your library.
Adding references to the library
Now we can start adding references to our library. You can add references from a .bib file or using the entry identifier.
To import references from a .bib file, use the following command:
bibman import PATH_TO_BIB_FILE
This will add all the entries in the file to your library.
To add references with the entry identifier, use the following command:
bibman add IDENTIFIER
This will search the entry information online and prompt you to confirm the entry before adding it to your library.
Exporting references
You may want to use this tool to manage the citations for a LaTeX document. In order to merge all the references into a single .bib file, you can use the following command:
bibman export --filename FILENAME
This will create a new .bib with name FILENAME in the current directory.
Viewing references
A CLI interface might not be the easiest way to filter and view the entries in your library, but you still can do so:
bibman show
This will display the path and title of all the entries in your library. If you have fzf installed, you can search and filter the entries interactively using the following command:
bibman show --interactive
But this tool includes the possibility to create a simple html page with all the entries in your library in which you can fuzzy search and filter the entries. To create this page and open it in your browser, use the following command:
bibman html --launch
Using this command you can upload the library to GitHub and use it to host your references online, a sample GitHub workflow is shown in here.