4.5 Citations outside LaTeX

The command reftex-citation can also be executed outside a LaTeX buffer. This can be useful to reference articles in the mail buffer and other documents. You should not enter reftex-mode for this, just execute the command. The list of BibTeX files will in this case be taken from the variable reftex-default-bibliography. Setting the variable reftex-cite-format to the symbol locally does a decent job of putting all relevant information about a citation directly into the buffer. Here is the lisp code to add the C-c [ binding to the mail buffer. It also provides a local binding for reftex-cite-format.

     (add-hook 'mail-setup-hook
               (lambda () (define-key mail-mode-map "\C-c["
                            (lambda ()
                              (interactive)
                              (let ((reftex-cite-format 'locally))
                                (reftex-citation))))))