Reading and search

Bible CLI accepts common book names and aliases. Quote a reference containing punctuation or a verse range so your shell passes it as one argument.

Read Scripture

bible read John 3
bible read "John 3:16"
bible read "John 3:16-21"
bible read Jn 3:16 --plain

Move through chapters, including across book boundaries:

bible read John 3 --next
bible read Matthew 1 --previous

Search offline

Search returns verses containing every query token, ranked by relevance with a stable canonical order as a tie-breaker.

bible search "living water"
bible search "faith hope love" --limit 10
bible search "kingdom of God" --plain

Punctuation and case do not change matching. A plain search with no matches writes no output, making it convenient to compose with other shell tools.

Output for people and programs

Interactive output uses restrained terminal styling. Redirected output switches to plain text automatically; --plain and --no-color let you choose explicitly.

bible read "Psalm 23"          # styled terminal output
bible read "Psalm 23" --plain  # stable tab-separated output
bible read "Psalm 23" | less   # automatically plain