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

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

Hi Joost,

I’ve started moving to Ebib yesterday, and it’s gone fairly smoothly.  I
wrote a little Perl script [1] to convert Zotero’s exports to a saner
layout, and started configuring Ebib.  I’ve a couple little remarks
here, then some replies inline:

* The behaviour of C-x b was fairly surprising. When I remove the
  binding it errors because the windows are dedicated windows, which I’m
  fine with.

* ‘ebib-lower’ was an unexpected behaviour when using ‘f’ (it appears in
  appears some other functions where it does make sense), so I made this
  little modification in ‘ebib--call-file-viewer’:

-            (ebib-lower)
-            (find-file file-full-path)))
+            (display-buffer-pop-up-frame (find-file-noselect file-full-path)
+                                         nil)))

  This could be behind a defcustom like ‘ebib-view-file-function’, in
  pseudocode:
      (if (functionp ebib-view-file-function)
          (funcall ebib-view-file-function file-full-path)
        (ebib-lower)
        (find-file file-full-path))
  ‘ebib-lower’ could be mentioned in that variable’s documentation.
  If you like the idea I could make a PR for it.

* I *love* that ‘ebib-layout’ is a thing!  Rmail really botches this
  with summary windows, it’s basically impossible to customise the way
  Rmails windows behave without rewriting it.

* I think the example keybindings in ‘(ebib) Modifying Key Bindings’ can
  be provided as default, at least Magit, Org, and VC.el do those
  bindings (tho they use C-c C-k instead of C-c C-q), and two of those
  are in Emacs proper.

  The Emacs manual only forbids modes to use C-c [A-Za-z] anyways (see
  ‘(emacs) Key Bindings’).

All in all, I’m having a very positive experience here, docs are nice,
code is clean, everything is pleasantly hackable so far.  Thanks a lot
again for this beautiful package!

On 2021-02-26 19:29 +01, Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26 2021, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:
> Thanks! It's nice to hear Ebib is useful to others.

You’re welcome :)

>> 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.

I suppose that would work for converting existing bib files that are
strict subsets of some other bib file to a dependent one?

If I ever end up writing a command for it I’ll send a PR.

>>     (defun ebib-set-bibtex-dialect (dialect)
> 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’d say most often you’d want the same values, but I’ve only scratched
the surface so far. If you wish I can send the above as a PR as well.

> 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.)

That’s nice to know, thanks! I think I’ll leave my existing notes for
later but I can use this with new notes.

> [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.

Thanks! I wouldn’t have found this! FWIW, I’d expect this to be bound to
‘g’, like in Dired, Rmail, etc.



Best,

        -gk.


[1] https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/bin/zot2ebib.pl