About

Bibman (BIBliography MANager) is a small console tool for managing BibTeX files. Its functionality is meant to be similar to JabRef and its user interface is inspired by Vim. It enables quick searching, filtering, editing, sorting etc. of bibliography entries using a text-mode, keyboard-only interface. It stores bibliographies in plain BibTeX files and uses only standard fields.

Dependencies

perl >= 5.24*, ncurses >= 6.0*, perl-Curses, perl-Text-Bibtex

*) might work on earlier versions, but not tested

Installation

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Getting started

After installation, run the command bibman MY-BIBLIOGRAPHY-FILE to open the bibliography file. You will see a list of entries like this:

Here are some basic keybindings:

• k move one entry up,
• j move one entry down,
• g move to the beginning of the list,
• G move to the end of the list,
• o open the pdf file if present; the file must be placed in the same directory as the bibliography file and named KEY.pdf, where KEY is the entry key; by default it runs xdg-open, you can override this by setting the option reader; you can also configure add other document extensions by setting the option suffixes,
• a add a new entry,
• e edit the current entry,
• u undo the last operation,
• s:save the current file,
• : show the command line,
• q quit application.

On the edit screen, use the arrow keys or k/j to navigate up and down the form, Enter to toggle editing a field and q to exit the edit screen.

See the manual page (man bibman) for a complete list of keybindings and commands.

Disclaimer

The software is in alpha stage and might be unstable. Please backup all bibliography files you're working with.

Author

Maciej Janicki macjan@o2.pl, 2017-2021

Feel free to contact me if you have any requests for features or other suggestions.