bibtex

BibTeX layer

Table of Contents

• Description
• Install
• Configuration
• Key bindings

Description

BibTeX and BibLaTeX files are a common way to manage bibliographies. The format was original designed to work with LaTeX files and subsequently has been adopted by other markup formats such as MarkDown and Org mode.

This layer adds support to manipulate BibTeX and BibLaTeX files and offer utilities to automatically add new entries by DOI, arXiv identifier, ISBN, and more.

Once enabled, this layer also introduces additional shortcuts in other modes to easily insert citations.

Install

To use this configuration layer, add it to your ~/.spacemacs. You will need to add bibtex to the existing dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in this file.

Configuration

This layer also supports having a global BibTeX file. For a basic configuration, add this to your ~/.spacemacs inside dotspacemacs/user-config:

(setq org-ref-default-bibliography '("~/Papers/references.bib")
      org-ref-pdf-directory "~/Papers/"
      org-ref-bibliography-notes "~/Papers/notes.org")

Certain modes, such as latex-mode with AucTeX, will automatically lookup references in a document if any of the recognized bibliography commands are used. Other modes may have a similar feature, or one could always set file-local variables (through SPC f v f).

You can also customize which program is used to display the PDFs. For example, to use Zathura:

(setq org-ref-open-pdf-function
  (lambda (fpath)
    (start-process "zathura" "*helm-bibtex-zathura*" "/usr/bin/zathura" fpath)))

More configuration options are available and are detailed in the org-ref and helm-bibtex package documentations.

Key bindings

In a Bib(La)TeX file, the following key bindings are added:

Key Binding	Description
SPC m j / g j / C-j	Next entry
SPC m k / g k / C-k	Previous entry
SPC m p	Open PDF
SPC m n	Open notes
SPC m b	Open browser
SPC m i	Insert new entry
SPC m s	Sort entry
SPC m h	Various actions on entry
SPC m l a	Lookup and add arXiv paper (don’t get PDF)
SPC m l A	Lookup and add arXiv paper (download PDF)
SPC m l d	Lookup and add paper by DOI
SPC m l i	Lookup and add book by ISBN
SPC m l p	Lookup and add paper by PMID

In addition, org-mode, latex-mode and markdown-mode all have the following key binding added:

Key Binding	Description
SPC m i c	Insert citation