esv - read the Bible from your terminal

esv displays passages of the English Standard Bible on your terminal. It connects to the ESV web API to retrieve the passages, and allows configuration through command-line options and the configuration file.

Example usage:

$ esv Psalm 23
Psalm 23

The LORD Is My Shepherd

A Psalm of David.

    The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
        He makes me lie down in green pastures....

The names of Bible books are not case sensitive, so John, john, and JOHN are all accepted.

Audio

esv supports playing audio passages through the -a option. The mpg123 audio/video player is utilised here and so it is required if you want to play audio passages. If you prefer, you can use a different player (such as mpv) by editing config.di before compiling.

Using the program to play audio is mostly the same as normal text usage. esv -a Matthew 5-7 will play an audio passage of Matthew 5-7.

Installation

To install esv, first make sure you have a D compiler installed on your system. ldc, the LLVM D compiler (https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc#installation) is recommended but dmd is also supported.

Commands prefixed with a dollar sign ($) are intended to be run as a standard user, and commands prefixed with a hash sign (#) are intended to be run as the root user.

First, download the source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/jtbx/esv
$ cd esv

Now, compile and install:

$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

Documentation

All documentation is contained in the manual pages. To access them, you can run man esv and man esv.conf for the esv utility and the configuration file respectively.

Copying

Copying, modifying and redistributing this software is permitted as long as your modified version conforms to the GNU General Public License version 2.

Full licenses are contained in the COPYING file.

Copyright (c) 2024 Jeremy Baxter