What is cove?

Cove is my take on a CLI bibtex and pdf organization tool. It draws heavy inspiration from papis and fzf-bibtex, but is selfishly centered on tools I like to use and for my own preferred workflow.

Features / quick start

• Quickly add records to your repository by running cove followed by as many DOI's as you would like, separated by spaces
  • If you have a file of DOI's, you can try cove (cat file_of_dois)
  • Duplicate records (as identified by DOI) will not be added
  • Keys are generated as singleauthoryear
    • Non-unique keys are disambiguated by lower case letters in the order they are added
    • This prevent breaking references to old records as new ones are added
• Quickly search through records using cove cite or cove title, which returns either the bibtex key or title of the matching record
  • Searching uses fuzzy matching using fzf and supports colour!
• Link pdfs to records by using cove link file_to_link.pdf and selecting the record using fzf
  • Linked pdfs are automatically moved, not copied, to the papers subdirectory
  • Remove pdfs using cove unlink
• Search and open pdfs using cove open
  • This is also the default behaviour for when no arguments are passed to cove

Installation

Edit the cove file and modify the repo_dir variable to the directory where you would like to store bibtex records and papers. Make sure this directory exists as well as a subdirectory called papers, if you want to manage pdfs with cove as well.

Check that local_bin_folder variable in the Makefile points to a directory that is part of your $PATH, and otherwise just run make in this directory. Please note that modifying the config_folder variable in the Makefile is currently not supported.

Note that this project depends on fzf and bibtool.

Why cove?

As part of my selfishness, I will be writing this utility in fish shell script, as that is my default shell. In keeping with the aquatic theme, I like the idea of hoarding all my papers in a cove. Think little mermaid...

Hahaha, so I was thinking of a grotto, not a cove. Oh well, cove it is!

Known issues

• cove cite currently does not disambiguate keys
  • modify the key code to copy from the bib file, rather than regenerating