esv - read the Bible from your terminal

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

$ 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 case-insensitive, so John, john, and JOHN are all accepted.

Audio

esv supports playing audio passages through the -a flag. The mpg123 audio player is used for playing audio by default but you can set the ESV_PLAYER environment variable to something else such as mpv if you don't have/don't want to use mpg123.

Playing audio is mostly the same as reading a normal text passage. 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. LDC is recommended but you can also use DMD.

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.

In the list of releases select the latest release, and download the archive with the name esv-X.X.X.tar.gz. After that extract it:

$ tar -xf esv-*.tar.gz

Now, compile and install:

$ cd esv-*
$ ./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 under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.

Full license texts are contained in the COPYING file.

Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Jeremy Baxter