coBib is a console-based bibliography manager aimed at researchers who prefer working in a terminal rather than a conventional desktop reference manager. It provides a command-line interface and a text-based interface for organising academic references.
The program follows a relatively simple design. Bibliographic information is maintained in a central database, while the associated documents can be stored anywhere in the file system. This separates management of references from the physical organisation of research papers.
coBib is particularly suitable for users who want control over their bibliography data and prefer tools that fit into an existing command-line workflow.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Stores bibliographic metadata in a human-readable YAML database.
- Textual-based terminal interface for browsing, searching and managing references.
- Command-line interface providing access to the same underlying bibliography management functionality.
- Git integration for tracking changes to bibliography records and maintaining a history of modifications.
- Location-independent document management. Attached files can remain in different directories rather than being collected into one library folder.
- Search bibliography entries and inspect matching records through the terminal interface.
- Support for importing bibliographic information from external sources, including DOI and arXiv records.
- Extensible plugin architecture using Python entry points.
- Optional Zotero importer provided through the separate cobib-zotero plugin.
- Python-based configuration with options to specify an alternative configuration file or override settings through an environment variable.
- Interactive tutorial and manual pages to introduce the available commands and workflows.
- Installable through pip, with additional packaging available for Linux distributions.
Website: gitlab.com/cobib/cobib
Support:
Developer: Max Rossmannek
License: MIT License
coBib is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
| coBib | Simple, console-based bibliography management tool |
| Rebiber | Replaces unofficial BibTeX references with official records |
| papis | Extensible command-line based document and bibliography manager |
| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| bibtex-tidy | Cleans, sorts and formats BibTeX bibliography files |
| Hayagriva | Rusty bibliography management |
| bibman (Haskell) | CLI/TUI bibliography manager |
| pubs | Bibliography on the command line |
| BibMan | TUI bibliography manager |
| Xapers | Personal journal article management system |
| papers | Command-line tool to manage bibliography |
| Gorae | Terminal-based library manager for PDF and EPUB collections |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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