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Papis

Papis is a powerful and highly extensible CLI document and bibliography manager.

With Papis, you can search your library for books and papers, add documents andnotes, import and export to and from other formats, and much much more. Papisuses a human-readable and easily hackable.yaml file to store each entry'sbibliographical data. It strives to be easy to use while providing a wide rangeof features. And for those who still want more, Papis makes it easy to writescripts that extend its features even further.

• Add documents and automatically fetch their metadata.
• Search by author, title, tags, and so on.
• Synchronize your library with whatever software you're already using.
• Share your documents with colleagues without having to force some proprietaryservice onto them.
• Import your data from other bibliography managers.
• Export to BibTeX and other formats.
• Integrate with your editor with plugins for (Neo)vim and Emacs.
• TUIs make it easy to get a quick overview of your library.
• Use the web app when the CLI doesn't quite cut it (for example on your tablet).
• Hacking Papis is easy! Use the API to easily create your own custom python scripts.

Install Papis with pip (orone of the alternatives):

pip install papis

Let's download a couple of documents:

wget https://www.gnu.org/s/libc/manual/pdf/libc.pdfwget https://www.ams.org/notices/201304/rnoti-p434.pdf

We can now add these to the (default) library. This will automatically query forthe metadata associated with thedoi.

papis add --from doi 10.1090/noti963 rnoti-p434.pdf

You can also use--set to add information:

papis add libc.pdf --set author"Sandra Loosemore" \                   --set title"GNU C reference manual" \                   --set year 2018 \                   --set tags programming \                   --confirm

Now open an attached file or edit an entry:

papis openpapis edit

The Papis picker (set using thepicktool configuration option) hashelpful shortcuts to call other functionality as well (pressF1 fora complete list). It can be used to open (Ctrl-o), browse (Ctrl-b)or edit (Ctrl-e) selected documents (marked withCtrl-t).

Import your bibliography into Papis from BibTeX:

papis bibtexread mylib.bib import --all

Or export it to BibTeX:

papisexport --all --format bibtex> mylib.bib

Papis also includes a web app that you can start with:

papis serve

You can then open the indicated address (http://localhost:8888) in yourbrowser.

Allpapis commands come with help messages:

papis -h# General helppapis add -h# Help with a specific command

Information about installation and setup can be found in thedocs, for example in the these sections:

• Installation
• Configuration
• Import
• Editor integration

Thedocs cover Papis' features anddiscuss possible work flows. If you still have questions, head to ourGitHub discussions — we'remore than happy to help. If you've found a bug, pleaseopen an issue and help make Papiseven better!

If you're not finding a command or configuration value that shows up in thedocumentation in your local installation, you may just be looking at the wrongdocs. You can find the documentation for the latestreleased versionhere and the documentation forthein-development versionhere.

• Blog postabout getting a paper's references withpapis explore.
• Blog post about using Papiswith Zotero and Syncthing.
• GNU/Linux Switzerlandwrote about Papis(in German).
• The folks at OSTechNix wrote a review ofPapis.
• Areview of Papisby Ubunlog(in Spanish).

Contributions are very welcome! Take a look atCONTRIBUTING.md forgeneral rules andHACKING.mdfor additional code-related information. We encourage you to also check out,contribute to, or even help maintain the other projects in the Papis ecosystemmentioned below 😉.

Papis has grown over the years and there are now a number of projects thatextend Papis' features or integrate it with other software.

Papis isn't the only fish in the pond. You might also be interested in:

• bibman (open source)
• bibiman (open source)
• cobib (open source)
• jabref (open source)
• Mendeley (proprietary)
• pubs (open source)
• Xapers (open source)
• Zotero (open source)

We thankIrteza Rehman for generously creatingour beautiful logo.