Beyond inserting citekeys, the Supercharged Citation Picker lets you paste fully rendered bibliographic text and manage entries directly — all without leaving Alfred.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/chrisgrieser/alfred-bibtex-citation-picker/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Paste Full Bibliography
Keyboard shortcut:⌘⌥↵
Generates a complete, human-readable reference for the selected entry using Pandoc and pastes it at the cursor. For example:
nocite front matter and pipes it through pandoc --citeproc, which produces a standalone references-section output rather than an inline citation.
Requirements and configuration:
- Pandoc must be installed and available on
PATH. - The citation style is controlled by the
csl_for_pandocworkflow variable. Set it to the path of any.cslfile. If the path is unset or the file is missing, the bundled APA 7th edition style (./support/apa-7th.csl) is used as a fallback.
Paste Formatted Single Entry
When the citation format is set to “Formatted single entry” (selectable viascp → Change citation format), pressing the standard ↵ key pastes a formatted inline citation instead of a citekey.
How it works: the script builds a minimal Markdown document with suppress-bibliography: true and pipes it through pandoc --citeproc, producing only the inline citation text.
Both the ⌘⌥↵ full bibliography and the formatted-single-entry citation format share the same CSL and library configuration, so whichever .csl file you have set in csl_for_pandoc applies consistently to both outputs.
Pandoc must be installed for both formatted-output features to work. Download it at pandoc.org/installing.html. The workflow adds
/usr/local/bin and /opt/homebrew/bin to PATH automatically, so a standard Homebrew install is detected without extra configuration.Reveal Entry in App
Keyboard shortcut:⇧↵
Opens your BibTeX file at the line of the selected entry in the editor configured via the open_entries_in workflow variable. Supported apps:
- BibDesk
- Zotero
- VS Code
- Sublime Text
- Neovim
- Default
.bibapp (fallback)
Reveal in app does not work for entries from the secondary library. See Dual Library for details.
Delete Entry
Keyboard shortcut:⌘fn↵
Permanently removes the selected entry from the .bib file. The deletion uses sed to match from the line containing {citekey, down to the closing }, so it works with BibTeX formatting from BibDesk, Bookends, and bibtex-tidy.
A .bak backup file is created automatically before deletion. If exactly one entry is removed, the backup is moved to the Trash. If the count differs from 1, the backup is kept in the library folder so you can recover manually.
Large Type Preview
Keyboard shortcut:⌘L
Displays the entry’s full, unabridged title, abstract, and all keywords in a large Alfred overlay. Useful for previewing long titles or abstracts that are truncated in the normal picker list.
QuickLook URL Preview
Keyboard shortcut:⌘Y
Opens the entry’s URL (or DOI URL, if no direct URL is present) in a macOS QuickLook window without leaving Alfred.
Open Attachment
Keyboard shortcut:⌃⌥⌘↵
Opens the file referenced in the BibTeX entry’s file, local-url, or attachment field using the system default app. The workflow decodes percent-encoded URIs, strips file:// and file://localhost prefixes, expands ~, and validates that the file exists before attempting to open it.
If multiple attachments are listed in the field, only the first attachment is opened.
The 📎 icon in the picker indicates that an entry has an attachment field set. This is separate from the 📕 PDF indicator, which tracks PDFs managed by the auto-file feature.