I often have the need to find some particular quote of the Bible – either I am reading some religious text or I want to link to some passage on my blog. What I miss is the ability to quickly see the relevant passage, open it in a browser and create an Org mode link to it.
Me being me, I’d like to do all of this from the comfort of Emacs (naturally). I found a few Emacs packages with similar functionality, but they all have the same main issue: they do not support the Catholic Bible. (And even if they had, they do not seem to have the features I’d like to have.)
Of course, I set out to write my own. It is a very simple package, with one command, nab-open-place. It asks for the Bible book name (with autocompletion) and the chapter number; with a prefix argument, it also asks for the verse number. It then opens the selected place in the browser, puts the link to it on the top of the kill ring, and optionally stores an Org mode link in org-stored-links so that it can be inserted using org-insert-link (C-c C-l).
Note that it doesn’t have any error checking, and will happily create a link to the 10000th chapter (or 10000th verse) etc. – this does not bother me, and it’s quite a bit of work to add that (I’d basically need a database containing precise information about the number of chapters in every book and the number of verses in every chapter). I hope that even this very simple package will make my life easier (and the next opportunity to use it will happen quite soon when I write the next post at Crimson Eleven Delight Petrichor).
One last thought is that I’d like to have a similar tool for the most popular Polish translation of the Bible, the Millennium Bible. Unfortunately, links to various books and chapters there don’t follow a simple pattern like the New American Bible, so I put that on a backburner. Maybe some other day…
CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryOrgMode, CategoryFaith