First steps

This page will show you the very first steps of installing and configuring tammy to your liking.

Installing tammy

Configuration file

There are three possible locations for the configuration file. First, wherever you feel like, as the library class accepts a cfile argument with a path. Second, in the directory in which you are currently working. Finally, in your $HOME. Note that in the last two situations (I expect that the later is the standard), the file must be called .tammy.yaml.

At the moment, the only configurable options are the bib_dir and export_dir variables, which will give respectively the the roots of your library, and where to export lists of references. By default, your library lives in $HOME/.bib. You can change it with

bib_dir: $HOME/.references

Also by default, the export_dir is $HOME/.pandoc, so that the files generated can be used directly from pandoc.

When tammy will read the content of your library, it will go look for references here. Over time, I will add options for the default citation key format (currently AutYr), and things related to the maybe-coming-soon ncurses interface.

The bib folder

For the moment, tammy will assume that the bib_dir folder has two sub-folders, called records and files. There is currently no check for the presence of these sub-folders, so crashes are to be expected if this is not the case. Is that poor design? For sure. Will it change? Hopefully. Is it hard to do? Not even, no. That’s just how I roll.

Creating a first library

Whether or not you already have records on the disk, creating a bibliography is as simple as:

>>> import tammy
>>> my_lib = tammy.library()

Note that the term creating is misleading: your library won’t be re-created every time, because it doesn’t exist outside of your session. Rather, the python objects that allow you to interact with it will be created. Loading a lot of records can take some time, but it’s a one-time thing. Future operations are really fast.

A short note about design

library / record objects