papis VS ar5iv

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.

Not sure if this is sarcasm... but I don't think OP made this (https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv), they are just sharing.

Besides I don't think this is meant to be a total replacement that everyone is going to magically use and abandon PDFs, it might just be a convenience within a workflow to skim and check the full PDF if necessary.