On 2015-06-17 Wed 11:08, Xebar Saram wrote:
> Hi Titus
>
> I have been exploring helm-bibtex a bit today and have some questions. btw
> is this the preferred way to make requests/ask questions or is
> github preferred?

Helm-bibtex is not part of org (although it tries to work well with
org).  So I’m not sure whether this list is the best place for
discussing it.  For now the issue tracker on Github might be a better
option:

  https://github.com/tmalsburg/helm-bibtex/issues

> in any case i was wondering a few things:
>
> 1. is it possible to have custom sorting? i want all views to sort by
> Author, year, month

I prefer to see the entries in the (inverse) order in which they appear
in the BibTeX file.  This way, recent additions show up at the
top.  However, I agree that sorting would be useful (see issues #5 and
#21); it just doesn’t have high priority for me.  Pull requests welcome.

> 2. i would really like a way to have stored smart groups (like the jabref
> dynamic groups if your aware of that). that is for example create a group
> that auto selects all publications i have (by my first/last name) and shows
> the count (in numbers) of these publications.

I’m not familiar with smart groups but it seems that all helm-bibtex is
doing is giving you very flexible smart groups defined by your search
expressions.  For example, if you want a list of your publications, you
can simple enter your name.  And if you want a list of your articles,
you can enter your name + “article”.  If you want all your articles from
2010, enter your name + “articles 2010”.  And so on.  The number of
matches will be displayed in the mode line.  If you don’t want to type
these search expressions, you could create a command that invokes
helm-bibtex with a default search expression and that command could be
bound to a keyboard shortcut.

> Another example is a group to keep track of all the papers im working on or
> invloved with by matching keyword author and prep/*other key word

I use two BibTeX fields to tag entries: “keywords” for keywords
describing the content of the paper (as usual) and “tags” for meta
data.  Values that I use in tags are “own”, “manuscript”, “poster”,
“talk”, … So if I want a list of all articles in progress, I search for
“own manuscript”.  Since the tags field is non-standard, it has to be
added to `helm-bibtex-additional-search-fields`.

Another solution would be to use the pubstate field and to search for
your name and “forthcoming” (add pubstate to
helm-bibtex-additional-search-fields for this to work).

> 3.is it possible to ass an option to auto generate a bibkey for a selected
> citation based on user criteria such as author(date)short-title?

Maintaining the content of the BibTeX file not really in the scope of
helm-bibtex (I prefer to write my BibTeX entries by hand).  Perhaps
org-ref or ebib can help here?  Once you have a function that generates
a new key and inserts it in the BibTeX file, you can easily add it to
the list of actions in helm-bibtex.

Hope that helps.

  Titus

> thx so much in advance, you and john have given me confidence to finally
> dive into the whole latex/bibteX world
>
> best
>
> Z