Re: [emacs-humanities] How do you use Ebib?

[Joost Kremers]

On Fri, Feb 26 2021, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:
> On 2021-02-25 15:53 +01, Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> I’m glad that it found you, I did hope it does! Thank you so much for
> this beautiful program, and for replying!

Thanks! It's nice to hear Ebib is useful to others.

> The dependent database mechanism is exactly what I needed, and seems to
> fulfil my needs perfectly from what you describe.  Is there a standard
> way to convert a dependent database to a main way?  I can’t seem to find
> a command / keybinding in the manual for it.

I thought I had added a command for it, but I just went back to check and I
couldn't find anything either... It's easy to do, however, by editing the .bib
file directly. There's an @Comment in there somewhere near the top that says
"ebib-main-file: " followed by the main file's file path. Remove that comment
and (re)load the .bib file.

> Wrt biblatex IMHO it’d be nice to add a function like this to Ebib for
> easily switching dialects in (AFAICT) the proper way:
>
>     (defun ebib-set-bibtex-dialect (dialect)
>       "Set the default dialect for Ebib and bibtex.el.
>     
>     This sets the values of ‘bibtex-dialect’ and
>     ‘ebib-bibtex-dialect’ and calls ‘bibtex-set-dialect’.
>     
>     The value of DIALECT should be one of the symbols in
>     ‘bibtex-dialect-list’.  The symbol ‘bibtex’ is synonymous with
>     ‘BibTeX’."
>       (let ((d (or (and (eq dialect 'bibtex) 'BibTeX)
>                    dialect)))
>         (setq bibtex-dialect d
>               ebib-bibtex-dialect d)
>         (bibtex-set-dialect d)))
>
> I think it’s easy to miss one of these steps, as it is.

I've been going by the idea that a user might want to configure the dialect for
bibtex.el and Ebib separately, which, I admit, is unlikely....

> I’ve found the relevant manual entries and will give them a read.  FWIW,
> my current workflow is as follows:

[snip]

It sounds like a very different workflow from what I had in mind when I wrote
`ebib-notes.el` and `ebib-reading-list.el`. The Org entries that Ebib generates
can be customised so it may be possible to make it work. One thing to keep in
mind is that in order for Ebib to be able to find a note, the note needs the key
as a `Custom_ID` property. So if you want to integrate your existing notes, this
property needs to be added. (The main advantage of that would be that you can
jump from Ebib to the note for the current entry.)

[Zotero web scrapers]
> These are all timesavers but also they pull in bad metadata pretty
> often, so losing them wouldn’t be a huge loss for me, and maybe even an
> improvement in the long run.

One thing I wanted to add is that Ebib has a reload command. So if some other
plug-in adds entries to your `.bib` file, you only need to press `r` in Ebib to
see them.

> The only reliable source of PDFs in my experience is a good friend in
> Kazakhstan...

:D

> Thats great!  I think it’d be trivial to add a keybinding that can
> directly open the associated PDF of link at point instead of jumping to
> Ebib.  I can add that to org-ebib.el if/when I write it, if you want.

Yes, that sounds very useful.

> This was very useful, thank you so much for your help!

You're welcome. :-)


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments