NOTE: Citar-capf is being merged into citar per this commit. All further development will be a part of the citar repo.

citar-capf provides a completion-at-point function (via the minor-mode citar-capf-mode) for citations in latex, org, and markdown (pandoc) modes. This completion depends on citar and its parsing of bibtex keys. This backend activates for citation styles used by markdown-mode (pandoc, (@)), latex-mode (\cite{}), and org-mode (cite:@).

Please note that citar-capf reads from a bibliography file or files specified in citar-bibliography and presents completion info as set by citar-templates.

Initialization

Load the package and turn on the minor-mode via the following hooks:

(require 'citar-capf)
;; Define hook
(add-hook 'tex-mode-hook #'citar-capf-mode) ;; you may need to define this in more than one tex mode (e.g. latex, reftex, etc). 
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook #'citar-capf-mode)
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'citar-capf-mode)

If you use use-package, here’s how you might set things:

(use-package citar-capf
  :straight (:type git :host github :repo "mclear-tools/citar-capf")
  ;; NOTE: Set these hooks for whatever modes for which you want citar citation completion
  :hook ((org-mode markdown-mode tex-mode latex-mode reftex-mode) . citar-capf-mode) 
  :config
  ;; if you don't already have this set in citar
  (setq citar-bibliography "path/to/bib")
  (setq citar-templates
      `((main . " ${=key= id:15} ${title:48}")
        (suffix . "${author editor:30}  ${=type=:12}  ${=beref=:12} ${tags keywords:*}")
        (preview . "${author editor} (${year issued date}) ${title}, ${journal journaltitle publisher container-title collection-title}.\n"))))

To remove the hooks just deactivate the minor mode.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Bruce D’Arcus for discussion of how to best flesh out the completion function.