Also, Stacy Prowell pointed me to gBib, a GUI front end for entries. Although I'm a touch-typist and _much_ prefer working directly with text files I'll take a look at this tool.
Touch-typing is less the issue than remembering the details of the bibliography format (at least for this 61-year old brain). Unless you are entering items into BibTeX files every day, it's easy to forget the format specifications and end up with a debugging challenge. This is one area where GUI-based tools save time in both the entry procedure and, with some tools, in directly inserting references into LyX files. There is a list of BibTeX tools in the LyX/Mac Howto and no doubt somewhere there is a list of Linux-specific tools like Pybliographer.
--
Ronald Florence www.18james.com
