Bruce and I looked into this UI approach in https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref-cite/issues/9. Bruce and I discussed and worked on this for almost two weeks. There are 70 comments in this issue.

There are opportunities now to annotate completion targets, which you can see in the link above. The annotations are not selectable though during completion, and this implementation was not too fast as I recall. You probably should also augment the tooltips like this because you have to be able to tell what a citation format is in the future too, not just at insert time, e.g. suppose you are reading work of a collaborator. It was hard to write, and ambiguous in ways, e.g. what is the export backend you want? The annotations should differ for LaTeX (where you want to see the latex command) vs HTML (where you probably want to see the formatted CSL cite)...

We did not surmount these challenges at the time. Maybe others will succeed in this another day.

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin (he/him/his)
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803


On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 8:42 AM Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 8:23 AM John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

>> A package could be created, say `org-cite-literal-biblatex' which is just a copy
>> of `oc-biblatex.el' with a different default `org-cite-biblatex-styles' and
>> `org-cite-biblatex-style-shortcuts' (or just sets those variables in
>> `org-cite-biblatex'). As far as I can tell this would provide exactly the
>> functionality you say org-cite can’t provide but org-ref does.
>
>
> I wrote this package you suggest in org-ref-cite. In discussions during that development, it was clear the preference was on the more abstracted, and uniform syntax across backends cite commands in org-cite, and not this kind of variant. Of course one can do this. It is not that org-cite can't provide it, it is that it doesn't at this time.

Just for some broader context on this particular issue.

The advantage of the org-cite style/variant design reflected in the
included export processors (natbib, biblatex, csl) is that the same
styles will mostly generate the same final output.

But that portability will only work with those styles and variants.

With the new org-cite-biblatex-styles defcustom, however, one can
augment or completely replace all those. But if you care about that
portability, you'd want to be aware of this, and think about it.

So per Timothy's point, you actually don't even need a new processor
for biblatex if you want to include all the extensive list of biblatex
commands.

Natbib AFAIK is already fully covered.

There's another POV on this though:

If one doesn't like to see the org-cite styles, because of familiarity
with LaTeX commands etc., I would argue that can be addressed in the
style part of an insert processor and/or in an activate processor.
E.g. I would argue this is a UI issue; not fundamentally about the
styles names.

Bruce