bibtui: a terminal UI for your BibTeX library

I manage my literature as plain .bib files — they live in Git, they outlive any app, and they stay the single source of truth. What I was missing was a fast way to actually work with them. So I built bibtui, a keyboard-driven terminal app for searching, tagging, and curating BibTeX libraries.

It does a few things I reach for constantly:

• Search as you type across title, author, journal, keywords, and cite key.
• Automatic PDF downloads of open-access papers from arXiv, Copernicus, OpenAlex, and Unpaywall.
• Keyword organization with read state and priorities, so a big .bib stays navigable.
• Plain-text and Git-friendly, so sharing and versioning a reference collection with collaborators just works.

It’s built on the Textual TUI framework, works with mouse and keyboard, and ships with a handful of themes (Catppuccin, Nord, Dracula, Gruvbox).

The fastest way to try it, no install required:

uvx --prerelease=allow bibtui

Beyond scratching my own itch, bibtui has been my testbed for AI-driven development — a real, non-trivial project to push agentic coding workflows on. It’s open source (MIT) and on PyPI.

Links

• Docs: tgoelles.github.io/bib_tui
• Source: github.com/tgoelles/bib_tui