The bibtex-powered browser for your PDF document collection

Tired of chosing the right filenames for your PDF documents? Or do you loose track of your PDF documents because of different file naming conventions? Or are you tired of giving your PDF very long names manually because they should contain the title and the full author list?

The rofi-bibbrowser solves all these problems and offers a rofi based menu to quickly filter all your PDF documents based on the tags of a bibtex file!

Features

• Offers a menu containg entries of a bibtex-file and PDF documents of a configurable directory
• Automatically associates PDFs with bibtex entries (and hides associated PDF files in the main menu in preference of the bibtex entry)
• Opens selected documents via xdg-open
• Renames PDFs to canonical name based on the bibtex entry
• Copying the bibtex-entry from the main menu to the clipboard

Behaviour

Initially, you are presented a menu containing an item for each entry of your bibtex file and containing all PDFs of your document directory that could not be associated to a bibtex entry. Bibtex entries with an associated PDF file are indicated by the [PDF] marker.

If you select a bibtex entry that has at least one PDF associated to it, it will open that PDF. Otherwise, it will ask you for the PDF document for that bibtex entry.

Selecting the corresponding PDF document will rename it to a canonical filename and open it afterwards.

Configuration file

The configuration file is just a python script and located at ~/.config/rofi-bibbrowserrc. You can overwrite any function that has been defined before and adjust it to your needs. Run rofi-bibbrowser --default-config to see the default definitions. You can find my personal config in my dotfiles.

See the ChangeLog for recent configuration file changes.

Requirements

• A current version of rofi in your PATH
• Python 3
• xdg-open (for opening PDF documents)
• xclip (for bibtex source yanking)
• https://github.com/aclements/biblib either globally or cloned to the subdirectory biblib/

Installation

Install rofi, xdg-open, xclip to your PATH. Install https://github.com/aclements/biblib globally or simply clone it as a subdirectory:

git clone https://github.com/aclements/biblib

If you install it as a subdirectory, make sure that you call rofi-bibbrowser with an absolute path and not through a symlink that is in a PATH directory.