Alan J. Cain

"Fihrist" [https://codeberg.org/ajcain/fihrist] is a console library+bibliography manager, which I wrote for my own use, and which I have made available in the (probably forlorn) hope that others might find it useful.

It aims at (1) speed, being entirely keyboard driven (Emacs-style keybindings), (2) simple integration into build scripts (e.g. exporting required metadata from the command line), and (3) bibliographic consistency.

The UI needs polishing, and the documentation is incomplete (although there is a tutorial/demonstration), but the core functionality is there and I use it to generate automatically Bib(La)TeX files for my books and articles.

It is named after the ‘Kitāb al-Fihrist’ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Fihrist], a 10th-century catalogue compiled by Ibn an-Nadīm [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Nadim].

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#bibliography #citation #terminal

May 27 at 2:42pmWeb
Show threadAlan J. Cain4d ago

A couple of other important features:

- "Fihrist" can scan a directory for files it does not yet know, extracting/fetching their metadata when possible, and presenting them in turn for the user to edit the metadata and save. It also intelligently detects when it encounters a known file that has been moved.

- In "Fihrist", when something is shared between different publications (e.g. a journal in which different articles appear, a series in which different books appear), it can be represented by a single database entry, with the various different publications pointing to the same entry (so the name of the journal and series, and their abbreviations, do not vary across articles/books in bibliographies).

It is written in Python using the urwid library (with _many_ custom widgets).

And it will probably only be interesting to someone at least as meticulous (i.e., pedantic) about bibliographies as I am. :-)

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Show threadMaxime Augier3d ago
@ajcain Thanks for this ! Definitely having a look at this later. Two questions: can you import from Zotero, and can you export to Hayagriva ?
Show threadAlan J. Cain3d ago

@max Thank you for your interest!

You could export a Bib(La)TeX file from Zotero and import it into Fihrist.

No Hayagriva export yet, but I will add it to the "todo" list. (But my current priority is polishing the UI and writing complete documentation.)