I’m sure the subset of pastors who use the Vim editor for sermon and lesson preparation is probably miniscule. If you are one of them I have found an excellent tool for inserting biblical references into your document. The open source Sword project has command line bible tool called diatheke. (I think it is installed automatically with their other Bible software projects; at least I think my Bible Time installation included it.)
You can quickly insert scripture into a document you’re editing in Vim with the :read! command. For example:
:read! diatheke -b ESV -k 1 Peter 3:21
This is much quicker for me than using mouse selection and moving between programs.
Hey! I may not be a pastor but I’m in that subset of people who use vim to prepare studies haha. I’m having trouble installing modules, could you give me a pointer on how to ad a version? Right now when I run commands nothing outputs and I’m assuming htat’s because I don’t yet have the modules installed.
Thanks!
Welcome to the very exclusive club! I’m not sure how to install a module with diatheke, I had installed my library with the BibleTime. Info on Diatheke can be found here: https://wiki.crosswire.org/Frontends:Diatheke It might point you in the right direction.
Hello. I am working on a similar project that may be of use to either of you. It is a plugin to insert Bible references into Neovim, but using fzf/Telescope to offer an interactive selection of either the reference or verses with a preview the and then insert it. If you find yourself using it and would like certain features requests or would like certain feature requests to use it, just ask me and I could potentially work on them. Project url: https://github.com/MasterTemple/bible.nvim
Thank you for pointing this out to me. I have used this for volunteer sermons over the last four years, and it has been an excellent resource. I like preparing sermons in Vimwiki using the diatheke call you mentioned. I then convert the markdown into .rtf or .pdf using Pandoc. I’ve spent way too much time configuring this, but it makes the sermon preparation process much more focused. I do not like having to keep going back to a browser and copying and pasting, and this is a great solution.
Thank you – glad its helpful.
I use this all the time as well for sermon prep, thanks for posting! Here are some diatheke calls I like to use:
#HEBREW
diatheke -b OSHB -o cflmMnsv -k Is 25:1-9
diatheke -b StrongsHebrew -k 559
diatheke -b BDBGlosses_Strongs -k H559
diatheke -b OSHB -o lacvmn -k Is 25:3 # mn gets the morphology and strongs numbers
diatheke -b OSHB -f plain -o cflmMnsv -k Isaiah | grep ” | awk ‘{print $1″ “$2}’ | xargs diatheke -f plain -b ESV -k |less # search for a strongs number, capture all the verses that have it
# Greek
diatheke -b MorphGNT -f plain -o cflmMnsv -k Matthew-Revelation | grep ” | tr ‘ ‘ ‘;’ | sed ‘s/:;/ /g’ | awk ‘{print $1}’ | tr ‘;’ ‘ ‘ | xargs diatheke -b ESV -k # search for strongs word
diatheke -f plain -b MorphGNT -o cflmMnsv -k Rom 12:1-8 # Greek with morphology
diatheke -b NASGreek -k 559 # look up strongs/NAS numbers
diatheke -b StrongsGreek -k H559