Photo by Ramon Kagie on Unsplash
I’m happy to announce that the first version of Lightref is now released and can be downloaded here. Lightref is a CLI that I developed for bibliography management, primarily aimed at facilitating making Bibtex bibliographies. Making a Bibtex bibliography is not inherently difficult, and all it really requires is a text editor, however, in order to get the formatting correct and to ensure the correct fields are entered using a reference manager makes life easier. For many years I used Bibdesk for this, and loved this program. But it is only available on Macs, and since switching to using Linux exclusively this has been unavailable to me. I then used Jabref, which is an outstanding program, but I have found it to be a bit of a memory hog, and often seems overkill to open a dedicated GUI with many, many functions just to quickly add an entry to my bibliography.
Lightref is a CLI utility that allows you to quickly add entries into your chosen bibliography, without the need to open a dedicated GUI program, or leave the terminal, if you are already writing in, say, Vim. It is designed to be quick and simple, and cross platform. To add an article to your bibliography, you simply need to open a terminal and enter:
lightref add article
and it will prompt you for the relevant information. The information is then added into your bibliography with the relevant formatting.
Full instructions for use can be found at the Github repo.
Lightref is open source, so feel free to use it and modify it as you wish, following the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. If you like it, and wish to contribute to its further development, please get in touch.