suci

Sūcī — a fast BibTeX / biblatex manager

Sūcī (Skt. सूची, “list, index”; also “needle”) is a bibliography manager for Linux, macOS and Windows, written in Rust and GTK 4. It reads and writes the same .bib files as JabRef, so you can switch between the two freely.

It was written for humanities work on South Asia: IAST diacritics, Sanskrit alphabetical order, union-catalogue lookup for Indian and European books, and citation styles used in the humanities.

What it does

• Opens big libraries instantly. A 6,700-entry, 4.6 MB library loads in about a quarter of a second, using a fraction of JabRef’s memory.
• Never rewrites what you didn’t touch. Unchanged entries are saved byte-for-byte; edited entries are written in JabRef’s layout. A .bak copy is kept on every save, and changes made by another program (JabRef, Dropbox) are detected before overwriting.
• Search that ignores case and diacritics (sastra finds śāstra), with phrases, field search, year ranges and exclusions: olivelle "code of law" · author:pollock year:1990..2000 · has:file -has:doi · type:incollection title:yoga
• Add from DOI or ISBN — paste into the box at the top and press Enter (or Ctrl+Shift+V anywhere). DOIs use Crossref, then doi.org. ISBNs are looked up in the K10plus/GVK union catalogue, Open Library and Google Books at once, and you pick the best record. Existing DOIs/ISBNs are detected. The ↓ button beside an entry’s DOI/ISBN fills in missing fields, showing old and new values side by side.
• Formatted citations for the selected entries, with italics, ready to paste into an email or a word processor: Chicago 17th author-date, New Hart’s Rules 2nd (author-date and notes, with or without publisher), AMA 11th. Add any other CSL style by putting the .csl file in ~/.config/suci/styles/.
• A one-page entry editor showing the fields you use for that entry type, worked out from your own library, in reading order. Rarely used fields are added on demand; housekeeping fields (owner, dates) are folded away.

• BibTeX source view (Ctrl+U, or the *Fields

  BibTeX source* switch): see and edit the raw biblatex text of an entry. Mistakes such as an unclosed brace are reported with the line to check, and nothing is changed until the text is valid.

• Eprints / ARKs: Eprint and Eprint type are offered on every entry; the type defaults to ark and is saved as soon as an eprint is entered. A pasted resolver link (https://n2t.net/ark:/13960/…) is stored as ark:/13960/…, and a button opens it in the browser.
• Short DOIs: the Shorten button beside a DOI (or right-click → Shorten DOI, for any number of selected entries) replaces it by its shortDOI such as 10/hbph7k. A Preferences option stores new entries’ DOIs in short form. Short DOIs can also be pasted into the Add from DOI box.
• English title capitalisation (headline style, after Chicago): right-click an entry (or a title field) → Capitalise Titles, or Menu → Titles for the whole library with a preview first. It only ever raises first letters (McGill, iPhone, al-Bīrūnī stay as written), lowers articles, conjunctions and short prepositions, keeps anything in braces or LaTeX commands (\emph{…}, \dev{…}, \textbengali{…}) as is, and respects lowercase Sanskrit terms and compounds (Nyāya-vaiśeṣika, bhojya-) in already-capitalised titles. Library-wide and automatic use (a Preferences option) skips entries whose langid/language is not English, titles in Devanagari, Bengali etc., and untagged titles that don’t look English. A separate option capitalises only in formatted citations, without changing the data.
• Open links: an Open button beside the URL, DOI and eprint fields, and Open Link (Ctrl+Shift+O, or right-click) opens the entry’s URL, or failing that its DOI or eprint, in the web browser.
• Multi-volume works: an @MvBook (or @MvCollection …) shows a Volumes panel listing its volume entries with their ARKs or URLs and Open buttons. Add volume… creates the next volume as its own entry (crossref + volume, key parent-key2), ready for its own ARK; a volume shows which set it belongs to, with Show set and Add next volume. Volumes inherit author, title and date from the set, in the list and in citations, following biblatex: “Main Title. Vol. 2” or “Main Title. Vol. 2, Volume Title”. The integrity check flags a URL or eprint field holding more than one link.
• Glossary items (@Entry, as used by bib2gls): the editor shows just Description, Name and Citation key; the list shows the name, and the citation panel shows “Name: description”.
• Linked PDFs: open with Ctrl+P; link files with the Choose… button beside the Files field (several at once), the Attach… button, or by dropping files on the editor; × beside a linked file removes the link (not the file). Relative links are resolved against JabRef’s own PDF folder (read from JabRef’s settings), the folder set in Preferences, and the .bib file’s folder.
• Integrity check (F7): missing required fields (biblatex rules, crossref-aware), duplicate keys, duplicate DOIs/ISBNs, ISBN/ISSN check digits, malformed DOIs and dates, single-hyphen page ranges, HTML left over from web imports, LaTeX accents that could be Unicode, missing PDF files. Many problems have a one-click fix; “Fix all shown” applies them as a single undo step.
• Diacritics: convert LaTeX accents ({\=a}, \d{r}) to Unicode and back, per entry or for the whole library, leaving other LaTeX (\emph, \cite) untouched.
• Sanskrit sort order (menu → Sort Order): a ā i ī u ū ṛ ṝ ḷ e ai o au ṃ ḥ k kh … ś ṣ s h. The default alphabetical order puts ā right after a and ś right after s.
• Citation keys in your existing pattern (wuja-2022, or wuja-scie), with diacritics removed. If the key is taken, the letter after the highest one in use is added (wuja-2022, wuja-2022a, wuja-2022c exist → wuja-2022d), so a letter once used for another work is never reused. New entries get a key as soon as author and year are filled in.
• Check for Updates… (menu): asks GitHub for the latest release and shows what’s new. On Linux, Download and Install fetches the new .deb and opens it in the package installer; on Windows, Download saves the new .zip.
• Undo/redo for every change, keyboard shortcuts throughout (F1 lists them).

Not (yet) included: JabRef groups, full-text PDF search, Word/LibreOffice integration (by design).

Github repository

https://github.com/wujastyk/suci

Install

Linux Mint 22 / Ubuntu 24.04: download the latest suci_…_amd64.deb from the Releases page and double-click it, or sudo apt install ./suci_*_amd64.deb. Then start Sūcī from the menu, or run suci path/to/library.bib.

Windows 10/11: download suci-…-windows-x64.zip from Releases, unzip it anywhere, and start Suci.bat.

macOS: build it yourself, see below. It takes about ten minutes, mostly waiting.

Sūcī reopens the last library on the next start; the ▾ beside the Open button lists the last ten.

Build from source

Short version, for any system that has Rust and the GTK 4 development files:

git clone https://github.com/wujastyk/suci.git
cd suci
cargo build --release
./target/release/suci library.bib

Step-by-step instructions for Linux, macOS and Windows are in BUILDING.md, including how to make a Linux .deb, a macOS .app, and a self-contained Windows folder.

suci --check library.bib prints the integrity report in the terminal.

Files

• Settings: ~/.config/suci/settings.json on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/suci/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\suci\ on Windows
• Extra citation styles: a styles folder beside the settings file (Preferences → Open styles folder)

Licence

MIT (see LICENSE). The bundled citation styles come from the Citation Style Language project and are licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Citations are formatted with the hayagriva CSL engine.

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