cobib VS bibcure

In the meantime, you can find a readable version of the README on Github and on the start page of the docs.

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/