bibliographic software (linux only)

[Rich Shepard]

I've used JabRef for years but 5.x frustrates me to no end. They've lost the
emacs keyboard chords that were present from 1.x through 4.x so to edit an
abstract, for example, I need to use the arrow and Del keys. And, they've
changed the UI so some data entry tabs have their widgets on the left half
of the application window and the entry preview on the right halt. But,
accessing the right-hand column of the data entry widgets must be done blind
because that half window cannot be expanded to the right. Serious PITA. Yes,
I've filed bug issues on both but nothing's been fixed. I've tried using
KDE's bibliography tool but that was equally frustrating. And Zotero doesn't
use bibtex.

Since I'm not a full-time researcher I don't need to share the bibiography
with collaborators and I will not store it somewhere in the cloud; my data,
my network. I also don't particularly care for a GUI; text-based works for
me since that's how I do most of my work (except when using LyX).

I've about 1,200 books and PDFs in the bibtex database and other than
entering new documents I want to search primarily by keywords, secondarily
by authors.

Does anyone know of a CLI bibliographic tool? Or a basic one with a GUI that
Just Works(TM)?

TIA,

Rich