What's new

Installs no longer fall over when a server has a bad moment.

Fixed

• selah install scenes crashed on a single slow answer from Project Gutenberg. It printed a dump of the program's source code instead of a message.
  • Doré's engravings now come from a copy on selah.hallelx2.com: all 100 in a few seconds.
  • Project Gutenberg is the fallback for any plate the copy can't give.
  • Every plate is still checked against its pinned SHA-256, wherever it came from.
• Every download retries a failure that can pass. That covers the translations, Matthew Henry, the Hebrew and Greek, and the engravings.
  • It retries timeouts, busy servers and dropped connections, after 2s, then 6s, then 15s.
  • A slow but steady download is never cut off.
• When an install does fail, Selah says so in a plain sentence, with how to try again. Files that finished downloading are kept.
• selah install with a name it doesn't know now lists everything it can install, translations and study packs alike. It used to list only the translations.

Install or update

curl -fsSL https://selah.hallelx2.com/install | sh

irm https://selah.hallelx2.com/install.ps1 | iex

Selah 0.3.1 runs on Windows, and is easier for someone who has read nothing.

Windows

In PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallelx2/selah/main/install.ps1 | iex

The installer picks the x64 or ARM64 build, verifies it against SHA256SUMS, and adds Selah to your PATH. Windows Terminal shows Selah best.

Easier to find your way

• Typing a passage in the reader works. "romans 8" lands on Romans 8, even though the letters are shortcuts there.
• The command palette (ctrl+p) understands everyday words. For example: help, settings, dark, pictures, claude, dictionary, bigger text, quit.
• Help explains every key in plain words, including the study tools. Its text wraps instead of being cut off, at any width.
• The first time you open the reader, a card shows the eight keys that matter.
• On the home screen, ? opens help, the footer says how to quit, and "resume luke 21" goes to Luke 21.
• In the Notes tab, you can just type.
• The header tells you what's left before a chapter counts as read.

Fixed

• After a dialog closed, the home screen stopped taking keys.

Install or update

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallelx2/selah/main/install.sh | sh

Selah 0.3.0 turns the reader into a study desk.

Study desk

Press tab to open a pane beside the text. It follows the verse you are on.

• Notes: a note on the verse and a journal for the chapter, both autosaved. They render as Markdown when you are not editing them.
• Commentary: Matthew Henry's Complete Commentary, opened at the verse (selah install commentary, 14 MB).
• Words: the Hebrew or Greek behind the verse, word by word, with transliteration, a gloss, the Strong's number and the grammar in plain English. Press enter on a word for its lexicon entry and every verse that uses it, counted by book (selah install concordance, from STEPBible).
• Ask: questions about the passage, answered by your own Claude Code or Codex using Selah's tools: passages, search, Henry, the original words and your notes. Selah holds no keys.

[ and ] resize the pane. - and = change the reading width.

Doré's engravings

Gustave Doré's 100 Bible engravings, each mapped to its passage (selah install scenes, 17 MB). When a chapter has one, the header shows ✦, and i opens it full screen. The engraving surfaces like ink, then drifts slowly. Selah uses kitty graphics or sixel where the terminal offers them, and half-blocks elsewhere.

Also new

• Search by Strong's number: type G26 or H2617 in search.
• The sidebar from the keyboard: ctrl+b, then j/k and enter.
• Selah's tools in your own agent: selah mcp serves them to Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client.
• Edge to edge: the terminal's padding takes the theme background, so Selah fills the window.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallelx2/selah/main/install.sh | sh

Every binary is listed in SHA256SUMS, and the installer verifies it.

Matthew Henry's Commentary comes from lyteword/mhenry-complete (CC0). The Hebrew and Greek words and lexicons come from STEPBible.org, Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0). Doré's engravings come from Project Gutenberg #8710 (public domain).

Motion built around light, Nerd Font icons, and typography that reads like a printed Bible.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallelx2/selah/main/install.sh | sh

New

• Focus mode (z): everything but the verse you're on fades into the page.
• Prose layout (w): verses flow as paragraphs with superscript numbers. Poetry books (Job through Song of Solomon, and Lamentations) stay one verse per line.
• Drop caps: chapters open with a large chapter number, as in a printed Bible.
• Reading meter: a hairline under the header fills with real reading time. When the chapter counts, a beam of light runs along it.
• Streak milestones: 3, 7, 14, 30, 50, 100, 200 and 365 days bloom in rings of light, once each.
• Motion: the logo's beam of light, the verse of the day and each chapter surfacing onto the page, counting-up stats, the heatmap drawn column by column, and dialogs and toasts that rise and slide.
• Nerd Font icons: used when your font has them. The first launch asks once (icons: nerd, unicode or none).
• Reduced motion: motion: "reduced", SELAH_REDUCED_MOTION=1 or NO_COLOR turns every animation off.

Nothing animates while idle. Measured in a terminal, the process uses 2.4% of one core over a full 7-second beam cycle.

Fixed

• After switching layout, the view could stay at the top of the chapter instead of keeping your verse in view.
• Logo shadows were dark patches in light themes with a transparent background.

Binaries

Same six targets as v0.1.0, verified by SHA256SUMS. Only selah-linux-x64 has been run; the others are cross-compiled with their native library embedded but untested.

The first release of Selah, a Bible for the terminal.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallelx2/selah/main/install.sh | sh

Highlights

• Reader: vim-style navigation, KJV italics, highlights, bookmarks, notes, copying verses, parallel translations.
• Navigation: a command palette that understands references, and full-text search with phrase and book filters.
• Reading tracker: only counts chapters you actually read. It shows streaks, a daily goal, consistency over 7, 30 and 365 days, a yearly heatmap, weekday rhythm, and per-book progress.
• Reading plans: five plans, with ahead/behind status and a projected finish date.
• Themes: opencode's 33 themes with live preview, plus your terminal's own palette.
• Translations: KJV, BSB, ASV, YLT and NHEB, all public domain. They download once, then work offline.
• Status bars: selah stats --json for waybar.

Binaries

File	System
selah-linux-x64	Linux, x86-64, glibc
selah-linux-arm64	Linux, ARM64, glibc
selah-linux-x64-musl	Linux, x86-64, musl (Alpine)
selah-linux-arm64-musl	Linux, ARM64, musl
selah-darwin-arm64	macOS, Apple silicon
selah-darwin-x64	macOS, Intel

SHA256SUMS lists the checksums; the installer verifies them.

Only selah-linux-x64 has been run so far. The other five are cross-compiled with their native library embedded but untested; please open an issue if one fails to start.