At the moment, you may find the ABP (Apostolic Bible Polyglot) as a worthwhile module for its Strong’s encoding and in-the-text notation of original Greek word order. There is a companion bible ABPGRK (Greek).

If you feel there are awkward points about Xiphos, you are more than welcome to post feature requests for improvements.

Xiphos’ method for Strong’s display is also enabled on the context menu. The very recent module OSMHB (open scriptures morphological hebrew bible) has Strong’s numbers. And some of the Greek NTs also have them as well, including TischMorph and others.

There has been an open feature request for a long time to have Strong’s display on mouse hover, but it has not yet been acted on because it represents a need for serious internal restructuring in order to support such a thing.

Searches in Xiphos are extraordinarily fast if one builds an optimized (“lucene”) search index — see Module Manager, Maintenance page, notice the tooltips on icons at the top, and the Index button at the bottom. Sidebar search uses optimized search by default, and falls back to straight linear (“multiword”) search if there is no index. Advanced search is selectable for either lucene or multiword mode, also with fallback (and notification).

The integrated WYSIWYG editor used for personal commentary, studypad, and prayerlist/journal editing is rather thorough, as word processor-oriented sorts of facilities go. If one has done personal commentary editing, I wonder how one might have not noticed it, and used some of its capability? Font choices, text alignment, indentations, bullet lists…also linking to other module references.

Access to publisher-restricted Bibles is a problem. We who work under The Sword Project umbrella struggle with publishers who are unwilling even to negotiate with us for access to their texts. Last summer, I contacted the folks who control RSV/NRSV, whose response to my inquiry was bluntly, “we do not authorize access for open source projects.” There is some sad idea that somehow “open source” equals “insecure,” yet huge amounts of most users’ computer-based lives are driven by open source software (web transactions using Secure Sockets Layer, for example). Modules produced for Sword Project applications like Xiphos can support encryption, so that users must purchase unlock keys to get access to text, just as for many other Bible study programs. We have a few modules like that already (NET “premium” [full notes] module, a German bible called Hfa, and soon a NASB set [Bible + Heb/Grk lexicons]).

By comparison, I have to observe that e-Sword’s UI is still stuck in 2000. For example, it doesn’t even support Bibles with paragraph markup — strictly one verse per line. Its search cannot encompass multiple modules. It has no tabbed interface, for instant access to more than one complete study context. Recent versions (just v8 and later) tout internationalization, with a dozen translations, but Xiphos has been i18n’d since its inception a full decade ago, and today has more than twice as many, 7 or 8 of which have arrived in just the last year. e-Sword does not support bookmarking as well as Xiphos, I’m not sure if its searches can yet be saved as bookmarks (single or sets, as Xiphos can), and it does not provide user annotations on verses, which Xiphos does in a yellow-highlighter-with-margin-note metaphor. e-Sword needs a special “graphics viewer,” yet Xiphos provides image support integrally as part of any module, even Bibles, and provides external image viewing besides, for those images too big or detailed to be seen well within the program panes. e-Sword’s module management scheme of “download a pile of *.exe, run each separately, click OK buttons a half dozen times each” is…well, deranged — compare with the integrated module management of Xiphos, by which we help the user to look through multiple module repositories, select a whole set to install, and then get them all with a single Install button click. Dozens of other usability features could be listed, but this paragraph is too long already.

Surely e-Sword is a good program for some, and has wide use in the Windows community, but Xiphos can win any challenge against it on usability and feature set, while also stepping over the cross-platform border. (Note that MacOS support is in progress as well.)

Regrets, there is no hope of Logos module support. Those modules are locked and accessible within Libronix exclusively. Similar thoughts apply to e-Sword modules…which is odd, considering that Meyers trumpets “just keep it free” about use of e-Sword, yet when asked directly in early 2009 about us providing e-Sword module access in Sword Project apps, his response was to go silent while ripping out v8′s use of MDB module files and replacing it with SQLite…so fast and so buggily that he had to put out 3 point release fixes in v9′s first month. Note that the inquiry wasn’t about subverting these modules — the basis of the inquiry was the user having already legitimately acquired e-Sword modules, and then merely using them in other applications.

We welcome feedback, feature requests, and bug reports on Xiphos, and we have one of the fastest development paces to be found anywhere in the Bible software universe: We Get Stuff Done, and 3.1.3 was released 2 weeks ago. Please feel free to contact us any time.

Karl Kleinpaste

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