bibcure VS papis

You don't normally need to enter metadata manually. You can import it using the publication's doi, arxiv etc. Then papis gives you an opportunity to review and update the metadata. The other functionality that papis provides is a quick search through titles, authors etc.

Of course much of that can be done with doi2bib [0], arxiv2bib [1], etc., which you can combine with the wonderful bibtool [2] to keep a clean bibtex file. That's what I use and the advantage of this over papis is that you can version control it.

That said papis has its use. It's less heavy than zotero, a bit less proprietary format (the info is stored in yaml files iirc) and it provides a layer over bibtex. If it had full text indexing and search I could see myself using it more.

[0] https://github.com/bibcure/bibcure

[1] https://nathangrigg.github.io/arxiv2bib/

[2] https://www.gerd-neugebauer.de/software/TeX/BibTool/en/

I found this app called papis that seems like it would do what I want, but there doesn't appear to be a way to self host it.

I've recently published a first version of papis.nvim, a neovim companion plugin for the bibliography and reference manager papis. It's mainly meant for people who use neovim for academic and other prose writing. With it, you can search your bibliography, edit entries, open files and notes, format notes, and more! Check it out if you're already using papis, or if you're using mendeley or zotero and have been hoping for a nice cli + neovim alternative.

Use (python based) papis: https://github.com/papis/papis

papis is a command line document manager. It's not vim based, but can use vim as editor.

that is cool thanks! I think I'll batch add them to my papis library

A final word on the comparison with papis. The major difference is the library/database structure: papis used a deeply nested library structure. Paper information gets stored in multiple info.yaml files whereas coBib was designed to use a single, centralized and plain-text (version-controlled) database file (YAML format). PDF files can be linked via paths pointing to anywhere on your filesystem (or remote URLs) which was important to me because during my studies I kept papers for various courses separate from each other.