Bibtex Integration
Completed
One thing I've currently set up for myself in Sublime Text is Bibtex citation auto-complete.
When I write notes about certain papers, books or something else, I want to reference a given source by its Bibtex citation key: @einstein1905mc would reference Einstein's paper on e = mc^2, for example.
Digging up the correct citation key from literally hundreds or thousands of sources is annoying, so it would be great to be able to point nvUltra to a canonical .bib file which it uses to auto-complete references much like it does right now with note titles.
I know that's a _super_ niche feature request, so I completely understand if it's out of scope now or even ever, but it would make my life _soo_ much easier 🙏
-
This is something that MultiMarkdown Composer provides, but is not planned for nvUltra (which is focused on collections of short notes, rather than writing "publication ready" documents.)
But as someone who occasionally uses BibTeX, Composer does make this easier!
0 -
Thanks for the response, Fletcher!
While I understand the reasoning, I'm very sad this feature will not come to nvUltra.
The way I'm using nvUltra is to write small excerpts and notes from academic articles that I'm reading and link them together to make referencing them later easier. To do that, I have to reference the source of a quote or note in every one of the notes I'm creating. While I could do that in MMC, it somewhat defeats the purpose of using nvUltra in this case.
Is there any way I can make you reconsider adding this to nvUltra?
0 -
We can always reconsider the direction of nvUltra in the future, and neither Brett nor myself likes to say that a feature will never make it into the app.
But I don't want to give false hope -- the likelihood of this feature being integrated into nvUltra is really low. It's a feature that works well in Composer and is part of the vision for that app, it just doesn't fit with the vision for nvUltra.
I don't use other commercial reference managers, but it seems like the sort of feature that they would have. Have you looked into those? I also haven't used BibDesk in a long time. Does it offer anything like that?
0 -
Thank you, I appreciate your response!
So I've looked into literally every reference manager and none of them do what I'm looking for. What I'm currently using is a combination of plug-ins to Sublime Text to get to what nvUltra does + reference auto-complete.
I use BibDesk to manage the references themselves, but the app doesn't let me store separate note files for the articles or books I'm reading. Maybe to illustrate a bit more what I'm looking for:
I have a paper that I'm reading, for example Wang, 2016: Growing pains for global monitoring of societal events. When reading the paper, I create different notes that extract quotes or comment on particular features, like this:
> "Third, the text-processing systems used in event coding are still similar to ones developed more than 20 years ago. Although ICEWS has recently begun leveraging a machine-learning approach, GDELT still relies on dictionary-based pattern matching that leads to overly simplified or misclassified coding instances." [@wang2016growing p. 1502]
> _Some comment here on that excerpt_
I do this many times, often 20 to 30 notes per article, which all need a reference like above. I also write short synthesis notes where I use the references but without ever expecting to publish the note itself as it is. I might expand on it and turn that into a full blog post or article, which is where MMC would/could come in, but that's not necessarily the case.
I realise that this is a super edge case, but there are _many_ people working off of Dan Shefflers article on building something like this in SublimeText (like I have done): http://www.dansheffler.com/blog/2015-05-11-my-zettelkasten-in-sublime/ & http://www.dansheffler.com/blog/2016-08-06-sublime-plugins-for-pandoc/ Basically the need is something like the Citer SublimeText plugin that Sheffler recommends, but for nvUltra.
1 -
(There actually is a whole community of people doing this under the term "Zettelkasten", many of which use nvAlt as their preferred way of storing notes. Others have even adapted the nvAlt source to more explicitly cater to the Zettelkasten system https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ but they too lack the Citer-capability of the SublimeText approach and aren't _as nice_ as nvUltra is.)
1 -
Just as a short update, the hacky way I've accomplished what I wanted is by writing a script that parses my BibTeX file and extracts all the citekeys and puts them into a file in the autocomplete dictionary directory. Hazel watches for changes and updates the file as needed.
Thank you for building in the autocomplete dictionary extendability, that's awesome :)
2 -
Lukas,
My goal with the editor was to include some tools that allow motivated users to customize things in ways I would never think of. Glad it was helpful for you.
The other functionality that can be useful is the text expansion component. It might not be as useful for this particular use case, but also powerful.
I also have some other prototype features in development that I am considering that are even more flexible but will share those if they work out properly.
Thanks for your comment!
1
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments