"Citations" - An easy bibliography tool for Gnome
The other day I was scouring for note-taking tools to see if there were any tools I could add to my growing toolbox for organizing my life better. As some of y'all know I am all about those plain-text notes. Things like Markdown and Org-Mode are a requirement for me. It not only simplifies things down but the plain-text formatting styles make the notes extremely portable. I don't have to worry about weird formats, databases, and other "features" that clutter up my ~/Notes directory and may not be readable in the future should I decide to refactor. When I opened up "Software" I noted right at the top a banner featuring "Citations"—a GNOME application for creating BibTeX bibliography files. Neat.
I decided to give this app a spin and I am honestly impressed with how easy it is. Now, I am not someone that normally compiles bibliographies, but that is something I have been meaning to get into the habit of doing and this seemed like the perfect tool to help me get started with that.
Now, for starters BibTeX is a format for storing bibliographies using a pretty simple plain-text system. An example of an entry looks like this:
BibTeX example
@book{CatHat,
author = {Dr. Seuss},
year = {1957-03-12},
title = {The Cat In the Hat},
publisher = {Random House}
}
This text stored in a .bib file can then be ran through a program such as pandoc or even Office to create a bibliography.
In addition, when you open or create a .bib file with "Citations" you can preview the generated bibliography as seen in the second screenshot. It provides dumps for all the major formats: MLA, Chicago, Harvard, APA. Whatever tickles your fancy. Having used it to collect together and generate citations for the last threat I posted on here, I highly recommend using it if you want to get into being able to easily generate cited sources.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
BibTeX text output in Vim text editor
As with most Gnome applications, it's very simple to use. Just remember to save your .bib before closing. It doesn't autosave or open your last .bib file but does show you a list of recently opened .bib files which is nice. If you've used a GTK4 Gnome application, it's usage will be simple and if you haven't, there really isn't much there.
As for installation, you can get it on Flathub so it should be available straight through Gnome "Software" and if it isn't Flathub provides easy instructions for getting you set up on your distro of choice.