papis VS zotero-better-bibtex

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.

There a zotero plugin that stores the entire contents of your zotero db as an auto-updated bibtex file too.

https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex

Thanks for sharing these. I already use a number of these on your list. Though I don't use copy-by-link for files. For me one of the key purposes of zotero is that its the place where I keep these files so I don't have to keep them elsewhere where they aren't as easily searchable.

I'm excited to try the duplicates merger tool, I've been forever putting off this because the normal way is such a slog. The Tag one also looks good.

To add to the list, my key add-ons are:

- better bibtex, this one is essential for me as a latex user

- zotfile. This one is cool because if you add annotations to a pdf, like highlighting or comments while you read it, then zotfile will pull those out into notes in the zotero entry. This makes it really easy to see both that I've read this document, and what parts I thought were important.

[1] https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/)

I was going to suggest that you ask the BBT dev about it as I had no idea why that didn't work, then I saw this bug from 3 days ago: Bug: citekey formula does not update. That might be the issue!

Another problem is that no matter how much I tried, the two available Zotero plugins for Obsidian do not work for me (this https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration and this https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin). I am not sure if that is because I'm on Linux, but they just don't work. However, RStudio on Linux works great with Zotero, and I can easily add citations using the Better BibTeX for Zotero plugin (https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex) to create citation keys. That way, I can simply copy/paste the citation key (e.g. '@lastname2020') in the text and have it render into the citation when I render the file in Rstudio. I sometimes write documents with > 300 references, and Zotero running in a Windows VM, trying to refresh a huge word document would take a long time, and would lead to corrupt citations. That's no problem with a markdown/Rmarkdown document.

I have the Better BibTeX plugin in Zotero installed, which keeps ~/Research/refs.bib up-to-date with my entire Zotero library.

P.S. Better BibTeX addon grants even more luxurious experience.

I've been using the Better Bibtex plugin for zotero for a couple months now, and so far it seems to work flawlessly. You can export a .bib file attached to a zotero collection or library and it will automatically update it as you add things to the collection.

I use Zotero with the better bibtex addon. Works great. When I first started using zotero, I imported my existing bibtex library, so all my existing bibtex keys all worked. I use zotero as my library for everything and add bibtex keys to things I cite.

https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/

Better bibtex