Xiphos is a Bible study and research tool based upon the "SWORD Project" libraries and the GNOME Desktop libraries. You can use Xiphos to do the following:

Xiphos aims to provide a simple and clean user interface while providing a powerful tool allowing a personalized Bible study environment.

"The SWORD Project" is based at http://www.crosswire.org. Other applications under the same banner are The SWORD Project for Windows (aka BibleCS or WinSword), MacSword for the Macintosh, BibleDesktop, a Java application, and BibleTime, another Linux program.

Xiphos is currently in development, so this manual may not reflect the program as you see it. If it does not, please file a bug at the project website, or email <xiphos-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>. All help is appreciated, as it will improve the software.

Applications menu: Choose Accessories->Xiphos Bible Guide.
Command line: Type xiphos, then press Return.
Windows: Go to All Programs->Xiphos ->Xiphos.

When you start Xiphos for the first time, Xiphos creates a default selection of options for display. Also, if no other Sword application has ever been run, and thus there are no Bible modules installed, then Xiphos asks permission to start the Module Manager so that you can select and install a Bible module in your language preference.

Xiphos then opens its interface with one tab displayed, showing Romans 8:28. Once the interface is open, you can use Edit->Preferences to change any of the selections already made by default.

Menubar: The menus on the menubar contain several commands which extend the use of Xiphos . These include the StudyPad and advanced search functions. The menus also help you to customize your use of Xiphos.
Toolbar: The toolbar contains buttons that let you quickly navigate through the Bible.
Sidebar: The Sidebar provides access to several features. It contains your bookmarks and the list of installed books. It can also be used to perform simple searches.
Bible Text Pane: The Bible Text pane displays the Bible text which is currently being viewed.
Previewer: The Previewer displays Bible text module options. These include Strong's numbers, footnotes and morphological tags. It is located below the Bible Text Pane.
Commentary Pane: The Commentary pane displays commentaries on the current Bible Text being used.
Book Pane: The Book Pane displays general books available from the Sword Project. These include modules like "Calvin's Institutes", "Josephus: The Complete Works" etc. This Pane can be accessed via the Book View tab just below the Commentary Pane.
Dictionary/Book Pane: The Dictionary/Book Pane displays dictionary information on selected words in the Bible Text Pane. It is located just below the Commentary Pane

When you right-click in the different interface sections, the interface displays a popup menu, which provides access to more module-specific options, including display controls and printing services.

At the top of the Xiphos main window is the menubar. Almost all of the functions are available by activating the appropriate menu item. The functions have been grouped according to their type. For example, the file operations have been grouped into the File menu.

The function of the Toolbar is to provide control over the Bible and Commentary Panes. Activation of the Toolbar option is done by moving the mouse cursor over the desired toolbar button and selecting it. A tooltip will appear if the mouse cursor is held stationary over a toolbar button, describing the function of the button.

Selects the Biblical book to be displayed in the Bible Text Pane and Commentary Pane. Changes take immediate effect.

Selects the Biblical chapter of current book to be displayed in the Bible Text Pane and Commentary Pane. Changes take immediate effect.

Selects the Biblical verse of current chapter to be displayed in the Bible Text Pane and Commentary Pane. Changes take immediate effect.

Allows manual editing of passages which are displayed in the Bible Text Pane and Commentary Pane. Changes take effect once Enter is typed.

Ensure that edited book,chapter and verse naming is correct, otherwise the wrong or no information will be displayed.

On the left hand side of Xiphos there is the Sidebar. Here the user can switch between the different Sword modules, view bookmarks, do simple searches and view verse lists. To switch between all Sidebar functions, shortcuts have been placed at the bottom of the Sidebar. Clicking on the shortcut activates the option.

Positioned to the right of the Shortcut bar is the Bible text pane. All your different translations will be displayed for full viewing. When starting Xiphos either your default Bible translation or the translation last used will be displayed.

A nice function in Xiphos is the ability to view your specified bible text in five parallel translations of your choice. The Parallel View mode can be accessed by selecting Parallel View just below the Bible Text Pane, next to the Standard View tab. Please note that you can only view one verse at a time. You can change the verse by selecting another verse, chapter, or book at the toolbar. Also note that modules that are Old Testament or New Testament only (eg Westminster Leningrad Codex and Byzantine Majority Text ) will not be able to display books, chapters, or verses that they don't have.

Additionally, a separate Parallel View window can be selected from the right click menu with Detach/Attach. Your Bible pane will return to its normal single text view, and the new Parallel View window will show the complete chapter, in all 5 translations.

There are several additional modes that can be selected from the menubar's View pulldown.

The first 4 checkboxes control whether each named subwindow is displayed. The viewable state of the subwindows is remembered on a per-tab basis. This makes it possible, for example, to have a tab dedicated to a maps module alone (in a dictionary module, having alphabetically-listed places), by turning off the display of Bible, Previewer, and Commentary for that tab.

In order to check the meaning of a specific word, double-click on the word you wish to lookup. The word should then highlight itself and the explanation should be displayed, if available, in the Dictionary Pane.

The Previewer is where the user sees Strong's numbers, morphological tags, footnotes, and cross-references that the Bible Text Pane provides.

Footnote content is displayed in the Previewer when you hover over the indicator *n in the Bible text; It remains visible until your mouse moves over another indicator, Strong's number, etc. Sometimes you may want the text to remain anchored until you can move the mouse to the previewer to click on a link or to read large footnotes. To anchor the text so that you can scroll it in the Previewer, middle-click the indicator (or hold down the Shift key) and move to the Previewer.

Cross-reference indicators *x work much the same way. Clicking the indicator will send the set of references to the Verse List in the Sidebar, where you can click them individually for reading in the Previewer.

The Commentary pane is where the commentary modules are displayed. This provides easy reading, reference, and access to different commentaries currently installed. The passage viewed by the Commentary pane is directly controlled by the current passage viewed in the Bible Text pane, so in order to change to a different passage commentary, select the desired passage on the Toolbar.

If there are images that are part of a commentary, general book, or dictionary/lexicon, they may be clicked to invoke a viewer on that single image, in order to get a better view. This is particularly useful if image resizing has been enabled with the result that images are made very small in the subwindow.

Many commentaries have additional headings which enable introductory information about the book and chapter currently being displayed in the Bible Text pane. In order to view them:

The Dictionary Pane's content is driven by its up/down selectors, typing in its navbar text, or double-clicks in the Bible, Commentary, or Book Panes.

The Xiphos interface has evolved over time, and there are two display libraries with which Xiphos can be built. The older, less featureful version is called "gtkhtml3", and the newer, more capable version is called "MozEmbed". Both of these display libraries render text in a browser-like fashion, using HTML constructs to control display.

Several desirable capabilities are unsupportable in gtkhtml3, and although recent Xiphos is written to take advantage of MozEmbed features, it is possible that the version running on your computer needed to be built with gtkhtml3 instead, either because the version of MozEmbed available for your system is not recent enough to support the needs of Xiphos, or it simply doesn't exist for your system. (Mozembed is not supported under Windows at this time.) The following differences will be apparent, depending on whether gtkhtml3 or MozEmbed is the underlying display engine:

Using the "About Xiphos" selection under the Help menu, you will see the display library with which Xiphos was built.

In individual modules' display, the right-click menu's Module Options selector provides font name and size selection.

The base font size is the size initially chosen for all modules displayed by Xiphos. The verse number and individual modules' font size choices are relative to the base font size.

Certain dictionary-style modules are Daily Devotionals whose keys are numerically in the form "Month.Day". If you have such a module installed and it has been selected as your preferred devotional, then you can ask that Xiphos display today's selection during startup.

Verse style indicates that each verse should begin on a separate line, or (when disabled) that verses should be allowed to group in paragraphs, according to the Bible module's internal markup. Not all Bible modules have such markup.

With Scroll to Previous/Next Chapter enabled, using the mouse to scroll to the beginning or end of a chapter will cause Xiphos to move automatically to the appropriate chapter.

If you enable Resize images, Xiphos will automatically resize image content in commentaries, general books, and dictionaries so as to fit the subwindow which contains them.

Highlight current verse, if enabled, will cause Xiphos to substitute mere current verse colorization with a high-contrast alternate color scheme on the current verse. The colors used may be chosen from the color selector pane (see above).

The "module" is the unit of content in Xiphos, and Sword generally; a Sword module is a resource available for viewing in Sword applications. There are several varieties: Most importantly, Bible texts, as well as dictionaries and lexicons, commentaries, and general books, any of which may include image content (e.g. atlases). They are installed either from a local directory structure (typically on removable media, such as a CDROM distribution) or remotely via ftp from a repository such as Crosswire, which is the home of Sword, and from which all officially Sword-sanctioned modules are available. Also, many other modules are available from non-Crosswire repositories.

If you have other Sword applications installed, they will all share the same set of Sword modules that you install through the Module Manager.

There are other repositories available besides Crosswire's own, though the modules available from other repositories do not represent content officially sanctioned by Crosswire. On the web, see this page for list of those repositories known: http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/Module_Repositories

After you have selected your Install Source, click the Refresh button to cause Xiphos to find the module summary available from that source before moving on.

Take note of the "Install Destination". In most cases, you will have a choice of a personal area or a system area. The details vary according to your operating system.

Unless you run as root (via su or sudo) you will only be able to install in your personal area, under ~/.sword. If you run as root, or change permissions on the shared directory, you will also be able to install modules for all users, typically in /usr/share/sword. There have been some requests for Xiphos to provide a means by which an ordinary (non-root) user could start the program, gain temporary write access to the system area while installing modules, and then revoke that access after installation is complete. Attempting to devise a scheme to do this has proven quite difficult, given the different superuser management schemes employed by various Linux distributions. Therefore, at this time there are no ongoing plans to try to solve this problem, and users are advised to enable write access to the system area outside Xiphos.

You may install modules to a shared folder so the modules are available to all users. If you have previously used "The Sword Project for Windows", this folder will be "C:\Program Files\Crosswire\The Sword Project\Sword". Otherwise it will be "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sword". You may also install modules to a location that can only be seen by you. This location is "C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\Application Data\Sword".

Vista works much the same as XP, except for the locations. The private location is "C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Roaming\Sword". The shared location is "C:\ProgramData\Sword".

The module manager generates both a per-type module list as well as a parallel availability list. The latter is intended to make it easier to find new items without having to work one's way through the per-type list, one subtree at a time. Modules which are either not yet installed or updated beyond what is currently installed will appear in both lists.

Modules that are already installed will show a checkmark beside them. If a fast search ("lucene") index is available, a magnifying glass will be displayed, otherwise an "X" will be shown; creation of the index is available on the Maintenance pane. Locked modules, which require that you purchase an unlock key from the module's copyright holder, will show a lock symbol. If there are modules installed for which a more recent version is available, a refresh icon will appear between the differing old and new version stamps. There may be an approximate size displayed, if the repository management provides this information, otherwise a question mark ("-?-") will be shown.

Select new modules to be installed by clicking the checkboxes and then the Install button at the bottom. Any number of modules may be requested for installation at one time.

If you acquire a locked module and have obtained the cipher key for it, the module is then unlocked in the main window: Open the module, which will probably appear blank, then using the right-click context menu, choose "Unlock This Module."

Several maintenance functions are available: Removal, archival, index, and index deletion.

Removal disposes of a module entirely. There is no recovery of the module unless you have previously archived a copy of it.

Archival is available for any module, although it is provided with personal commentaries specifically in mind. A *.zip of the module is left in the directory ~/.sword/zip. Archival prior to removal of personal commentaries is recommended, in order to be available for future re-install if the subject matter of the personal commentary becomes important again.

Indexing is provided so that the underlying Sword search support can create the index needed for the "lucene" multi-word fast-search functions. If the index is not created, multi-word search will still be available, but it will be much slower. With the index in place, searches through an entire Bible can take just a few seconds.

Some resource modules in Sword Project format are available from sources other than Crosswire and not from a module manager-ready repository. Necessarily, installing such a module is a manual task.

Modules are normally packaged as *.zip files; they contain a configuration file plus a number of data files. Installation of such a module is done by cd'ing to your personal Sword (not Xiphos) configuration directory, ~/.sword, and unzipping the file there. The configuration file will be left in "mods.d", and the module's data files will go into a subdirectory of "modules". Alternatively, if you have write access to the system Sword directory, typically /usr/share/sword, you may cd there instead before unzipping.

Restart Xiphos after installing such a module, so that a fresh instance of the program can notice the new module in place.

To conduct a quick search within the current Bible or commentary module, the Search Bar in the Sidebar should usually be adequate. Click either in the menu bar Edit->Search or in the Sidebar Modules->Search to access it.

Allows entry of the key for which you would like to search. The search key can be a word, part of a word, several words, a phrase, or a regular expression depending on the type of search selected. When the search key is entered and all other selections in the search dialog are complete, click the Find button to begin the search.

This search uses the optimized search method (see next section) if the module has previously been indexed, and will use AND semantics by default (verses must contain all words you entered).

Allows selection of which modules you would like to search. Select Bible to search Bible versions or Commentary to search commentaries. Only the currently active module will be searched.

Multi word

This type will match any verse that has all the words in the search key, regardless of where they appear in the verse.

Regular expression

This search uses a regular expression as a search key. A regular expression is a pattern used to match a string of text. A regular expression can be used to find verses with words that match a particular pattern. For example the regular expression \ A[a-z]*iah will match verses that contain the words Aiah, Ahaziah, Athaliah and Amariah.

A complete discussion of regular expressions is beyond the scope of this manual, but more information can be found in the grep man page.

Exact phrase

This type will match the search key exatly as entered. If the search key is it is good, this search would match a verse which contains "it is good," but would not match a verse which contains " good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin."

Allows selecting of search options. The only available option is Match case. Check this box to make the search case sensitive.

Allows defining the range within the specificed module that will be searched. There are three search scopes available:

No scope

This button causes the search to to include the entire module.

Use bounds

Selecting this button produces two dropdown selector boxes marked Lower and Upper. Select the first book to search in the Lower box and the last book to search in the Upper box. The search will begin with the Lower book and end with the Upper book and include all books in between.

Chapter and verse numbers can be entered into the search bound boxes as well to further narrow the search.

Last search

Select this button to do a new search including only the verses returned as a result of the last search. Use this with a new search key to narrow the search further.

This shows a list of the current search results for previewing, navigation, or saving.

Preview: To preview the search result, simply click on an individual result. The entry will show in the preview pane.
Navigation: Navigation to the search result can be done in two ways. To open the result in a new tab, middle-click the mouse. To open the result in the current tab, double-click the result.
Save Results: You may save your results as a list of bookmarks. To do this, right-click and select Save List. You will be prompted to enter a name for the folder that your results will be saved to. After you have saved the results, you may view them by going to your bookmarks and finding the folder you just named.

More complicated searches might require the use of the advanced search functions, found under Edit->Advanced Search.

In Advanced Search, much more complex queries can be constructed, involving custom search ranges, custom lists of modules over which to search, regular expression matching (see next section), and attribute-based searches such as are found in footnotes or Strong's Hebrew and Greek dictionary references.

The default search is multi-word, a somewhat slow and blunt search through module text. Also available is an optimized search based on the Lucene indexing and search library. In order to use the optimized search, the index must be constructed beforehand: Please see the preceding section on the Module Manager regarding the Maintenance functions, including indexing. A web search will provide several references to the syntax needed to put to use the power of optimized Lucene search. A few examples follow:

Simple Searches: just type in the words you want to search for. To return only verses that include all of the words, prefix the word with "+". So, in the KJV, you could find Psalm 23 by searching for "+Lord +shepherd +want". To search for an entire phrase, surround the entire phrase with quotes, like "maketh me to lie down" (note that quotes are unnecessary in all of the other examples).

Single Letter Wildcard: to search for "veil" or "vail", use this syntax "v?il". The "?" represents a single character that could be anything. A more complex example returns both spellings for Isaiah used in the KJV. "?saia?" will return results for "Isaiah" and "Esaias".

Multiple Letter Wildcard: to search for "prophet" or "prophesy" or "prophecy" or "prophesied", use this syntax "prophe*".

AND syntax: in the advanced search to return results for all of the search terms, you must put "AND" in between the terms. To continue our example, if we wish to search for any occurrence of Isaiah or Esaias that also mention either prophet, or prophecy, or prophesy, we can do a search like this: "?saia? AND prophe*".

By default, two standard search ranges are defined, for Old and New Testament; you may wish to define others for e.g. "Gospels" or "Paul's Epistles". One custom module list containing only the first Bible found will be present. If desired, new searches can be performed across only the current results of the previous search. Any modules may be searched, including general books and even dictionaries, in any combination.

Note the tooltip in the screenshot above, for Attributes search. This qualifier is used to perform searches on attributes that are carried with verses, instead of verse content proper, such as footnote content or Strong's Hebrew and Greek references. If this button is selected, specific attribute qualifiers must be made in the Attribute Search tab, at the right end of the tab set. Strong's references are identified with a leading "H" or "G" and the numeric Strong's identifier. Thus, a search of KJV for Strong's Greek #140, using "G140", will return the single result of Matthew 12:18.

If you have indexed your modules, there is a much faster way to search for Strong's references. Enter your search preceded by "lemma:", so to search for Strong's Greek #140, enter "lemma:G140". You must have selected Optimized ("Lucene") for this to work.

Results will show in the Results tab. If you wish to show Strongs, Morphology, or Footnote tags, make those selections on the Attributes Search tab. Clicking once on the result will show the result in the Advanced Search previewer. Hovering over Strongs, Morphology, Footnote, or Cross-reference tags will show the results in the main previewer. Double-clicking a result will cause the current tab to navigate to that result. This applies to search results in general books and commentaries as well, but note that the respective tab must be visible.

Changes to some of the settings (e.g. scope of search, searched modules, etc.) in Advanced Search will affect the simple search via the side pane but not vice versa.

Regular expression searches provide a way to do simple or complex searches for strings that match a pattern or set of patterns (branches) separated by vertical bars "|". While a pattern can be built to look for a word or phrase, a simple pattern that consists of a word does not look for only that word but for any place the string of letters that make that word are found. A search for "right" will return verses that contain the word "right", but also "righteous", "righteousness", "unrighteous", "upright" and even "bright". A search for "hall not" is not a search for "hall" AND "not" but for the string "hall not" with a space between the second "l" and the "n". The search for "hall not" will find occurrences of "shall not".

The power of Regular Expressions is in the patterns (or templates) used to define a search. A pattern consists of ordinary characters and some special characters that are used and interpreted by a set of rules. Special characters include .\[^*$?+. Ordinary (or simple) characters are any characters that are not special. The backslash, "\", is used to convert special characters to ordinary and ordinary characters to special.

Example: the pattern "i. love\." will find sentences that end with "his love" or "in love" or "is love" followed by a period. The first period in "i. love\." is a special character that means allow any character in this position. The backslash in "i. love\." means that the period following it is not to be considered a special character, but is an ordinary period.

The Period "." will match any single character even a space or other non-alphabet character. s.t matches sit, set, sot, etc., which could be located in sitting, compasseth and sottish b..t matches boot, boat and beat foot.tool matches footstool and foot tool

The asterisk "*" matches zero or more characters of the preceding: set, character or indicated character. Using a period asterisk combination ".*" after a commonly found pattern can cause the search to take a very long time, making the program seem to freeze. be*n matches beeen, been, ben, and bn which could locate Reuben and Shebna.

The Plus Sign "+" matches one or more characters of the preceding: set, character or indicated character. Using a period and plus sign combination ".+" after a commonly found pattern can cause the search to take a very long time, making the program seem to freeze. be+n matches beeen, been and ben, but not bn.

The Question Mark "?"matches zero or one character of the preceding: set, character or indicated character. be?n matches ben and bn but not been. trees? matches trees or tree.

The Square Brackets "[]" enclose a set of characters that can match. The period, asterisk, plus sign and question mark are not special inside the brackets. A minus sign can be used to indicate a range. If you want a caret "^" to be part of the range do not place it first after the left bracket or it will be a special character. To include a "]" in the set make it the first (or second after a special "^") character in the set. To include a minus sign in the set make it the first (or second after a special "^") or last character in the set. s[eia]t matches set, sit, and sat, but not sot. s[eia]+t matches as above but also, seat, seet, siet, etc. [a-d] matches a, b, c, or d. [A-Z] matches any uppercase letter. [.;:?!] matches ., ;, :, ?, or ! but not a comma. [ ]^-] matches ] or ^ or -

If the Caret is the first character after the left bracket ("[^") it means NOT. s[^io]t matches set, sat, etc., but not sit and sot.

If the Caret is the first character in a pattern ("^xxx") it anchors the pattern to the start of a line. Any match must be at the beginning of a line. Because of unfiltered formatting characters in some texts, this feature does not always work, but may if a few periods are placed after the caret to account for the formatting characters. ^In the beginning matches lines that start with "In the beginning". (May need to use: ^.....In the beginning)

If the Dollar Sign is the last character ("xxx$") in a pattern it anchors the pattern to the end of a line. Any match must be at the end of a line. Because of unfiltered formatting characters in some texts, this feature does not always work, but may if a few periods are placed before the dollar sign to account for the formatting characters. Amen\.$ matches lines that end with "Amen." (May need to use Amen\....$, Amen\..........$, or even Amen\....................$)

The Vertical Bar "|" between patterns means OR. John|Peter matches John or Peter. John .*Peter|Peter .*John matches John ... Peter or Peter ... John. (.* slows a search) pain|suffering|sorrow matches pain, or suffering, or sorrow.

The Backslash prior to a special character ("\*") indicates that the character is not being used in its special meaning, but is just to match itself. amen\. matches amen. but not ament and will not locate firmament.

The Backslash prior to an ordinary character ("\o") indicates that the character is not being used to match itself, but has special meaning.

The Studypad will save into your working directory, making it useful for collecting and exporting information and Bible study material from Xiphos into other programmes.

In order for spellcheck to be available, one of the languages under Edit->Current Languages must be set.

To build up a personal commentary you will need to install the editable 'Personal' sword module from the English Commentaries section. Right click it and choose Edit->Note->Personal in the menu.

An editor window similar to the Study Pad will appear. Edit your comment and save it; in the future it will appear as your comment to the relevant verse.

Use the Synchronise Button to quickly change location of your editor to that of the underlying Bibletext or use the Book, Chapter, and Verse selectors to choose to edit your comment to one particular verse.

In order for spellcheck to be available, one of the languages under Edit->Current Languages must be set.

To create a link to other verses right click the text and choose Link... In the pop-up window enter the link location and the module linked to.

It is possible to rename a personal commentary to suit a particular subject of study for that commentary. Thus, multiple personal commentaries may be installed: Rename the existing personal commentary, and then re-install another instance of the personal commentary if desired. Personal commentary names can consist only of letters and digits, and cannot duplicate an existing module's name. Rename is accessible off the right-click menu.

If the study embodied in a particular personal commentary is no longer needed, archival is available in the module manager, prior to removal, for possible future re-installation. See the module manager's Remove/Archive page. Any module may be archived, not just personal commentaries.

Although there are 31,102 verses in standard versification, it is unlikely that more than a tiny fraction of all verses will have personal commentary attached to them. A verse list showing where personal commentary notes exist is available from Right Click-> Dump Pers.Comm..

Xiphos supports user-created and -editable modules to contain general content. Initially conceived as simple prayer lists, they have expanded to include daily journals and topic-outline content. The user can maintain prayer lists, or prepare sermons, or write any structured content desired.

To enable prayer list and journal support, see the Preferences dialog as previously described. There, in General->Misc, check the item labeled Enable Prayer Lists. You will see a new item appear at the bottom of the sidebar's module list for "Prayer Lists/Journals".

Right-click on this entry, and you will be offered a context menu to create new modules. All the offered options are of the same type, but what is offered is a variety of templates from which to work. There are 5 templates at this time.

Their structure is the same, but the offered templates provide a variety of hints regarding ways to organize content. Simple is trivial, and can be considered a mental Post-It note. Subject is useful as a more organized version. Monthly provides a per-month structure in which to track needed content. Daily Journal is a full 365-day calendar in which to track a personal journal or ongoing prayer needs. And finally, Outlined Topic is a full, expandable outline suitable for topics and subtopics.

Journals and prayer lists have the structure of a general book: If simply selected for display from the module list, they will appear in the usual subwindow for general books.

Editing a journal or prayer list is done by right-clicking the module name to get its context menu, whose middle item is Open in Editor. The sections and subsections will be listed in the left margin. Click one, and the editor navigates to that section. The context menu on right-click of section keys provides for adding, deleting, and editing the names of sections and subsections.

If the general book subwindow is currently displaying the journal or prayer list being edited, it will synchronize with new content when Save is used.

As mentioned, these user-edited modules are in effect general books. This means they can be viewed in any Sword Project application. Thus, you can use these modules immediately in BibleTime, for example; or from the Module Manager's Maintenance page, you can archive a zip file to copy to a Windows system where you can then install the zip content as a module for the Windows user interface. Few other Sword Project applications provide for editing these modules, however, meaning that they will appear in such other applications as just ordinary general books.

In the future, it is planned that a module sharing facility will become available, by which user-edited modules such as these can be uploaded to become available to a wide audience. The current install repository facility will be expanded to provide upload as well as the existing download capability in order to support this. Thus, users will be able to share their sermons, Bible studies, and other personally-authored content with other Sword application users.

One way you can get help with Xiphos is using our low-traffic users' mailing list. You can sign up by clicking this link. Once you are signed up, you can email the list with any problems you are having and other users or the developers will respond, typically within a day.

Another way to get help is with online chat. Xiphos has an IRC channel on freenode, #xiphos. If you don't know what that means, it's ok. Just click this link (it will open your web browser), type a nickname or accept the default, and click "Click to join chatroom". This will take you to a chatroom where the developers and other users are available to help you with issues you may be having. Although many times someone will answer your question immediately, sometimes you may have to wait a few minutes or longer.

Xiphos is ideally suited for studying the original Greek and Hebrew. To get started, you will want the following modules:

While still in the module manager, create indexes for all of the modules you just installed. Then close the module manager and open Edit-> Preferences and go to Modules->Misc. Set your Hebrew and Greek lexicons according to what you installed. Close preferences and open the KJV module. Turn on the module options Right Click->Module Options->Show Strongs and Right Click->Module Options ->Show Morphology. You should see the Bible text change to show Strongs numbers underneath the appropriate English words. Hover over the numbers (or letters for morphology) with the mouse and you will see the definition displayed in the previewer pane. Click on the link and the definition will show in the dictionary pane. If you are using StrongsRealGreek or StrongsRealHebrew, you can click on any other number referenced in the definition and you will be taken to that entry.

Choose Edit->Advanced Searchor press F3. Under Search Type, select Optimized ("Lucene"). Click on the Attribute Search tab, and make check the box that says Strongs Numbers. Now click in the entry field at the top and search for the number you are looking for preceded by "lemma:" and "G" for Greek or "H" for Hebrew. So to look for the Hebrew word tsad-deek (6662), enter "lemma:H6662". Once the search is done, the results pane will be shown. Notice that when you click on a result, it will show the result in the preview pane, and the strong's numbers will show as well, following immediately after the words they match. Also note that hovering over these numbers will show the definition in the main preview pane.

Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to Xiphos Development list <xiphos-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>. Comments may also be submitted via the project trackers at SourceForge.

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