How to use Scriptorium

A Bible study workstation: forty-two translations, Hebrew and Greek with Strong's numbers, lexicons, commentaries, and the tools to mark, write, connect and memorise. This guide covers the parts you will use most. Start with the quick start; the rest is there when you want it.

Quick start — five minutes

1. Sign in

Open the link the owner sent you, enter your email, and create a passkey — Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or a security key. There is no password. When your device asks where to save the passkey, choose your phone or tablet: that puts it in iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager, so it works on all your devices. "This device only" means exactly that.

You will be shown a recovery code once. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. If you ever lose every device with your passkey, it is the only way back in — nobody can reset it for you, by design.

After that, signing in is one tap: Sign in with a passkey. From a device that does not have your passkey, scan the QR code with your phone.

2. Read

Press G (or use the reference box) and type a passage — John 3, Ps 23, Rom 8:28. J and K (or the arrow keys) move a chapter back and forward. The current translation is shown in the reader's header; tap it to switch. V cycles paragraph, verse-by-verse and manuscript layout — no verse numbers, wide margins, for marking a text like paper.

3. Mark and write

Select any words and a small toolbar appears: highlight in a colour and style, margin mark, note (N), bookmark (B), or tag (🏷). Anything you mark is there the next time you open that passage: a verse you wrote about shows ✎ beside its number, a bookmarked one shows 🔖.

4. Dig

Press S to show Strong's numbers, then tap any word for its meaning, every lexicon entry, and every place it occurs. Press / to search everything at once — Scripture, dictionaries, commentaries, your own notes and books.

5. Come back

Everything is saved as you go. Refresh, close the tab, open it on your phone — you land exactly where you were, down to the verse.

Reading

Getting somewhere. G opens the go-to box. It understands abbreviations and ranges: 1 Cor 13, Gen 1-3, Mt 5:3-12. J / K step chapters. The ⊞ map in the reader's header draws the whole Bible as 66 books; tap a book for its chapters, a chapter to read it. With nothing searched, the map is shaded by your own work — where you have highlighted, noted and bookmarked — so it doubles as "where have I been".

Translations. Tap the translation name in the header, or open the Translations panel from the sidebar (M), which lists all forty-two. Sort them by name, by date published, or by the ones you have used recently; tick show descriptions for a line on each. A · after an abbreviation means it carries Strong's numbers. The reader starts on the KJV for that reason; pick another and it stays picked.

Layout. D opens display settings: paragraph or verse layout, red-letter words of Jesus, translator italics, footnotes, text size, and light, dark, sepia or e-ink themes. Split the screen into up to four panes, each showing any view — reader, parallel, notes, canvas — and optionally following the same passage. 14 focus a pane. Every divider drags; double-click the study panel's divider to reset it. I toggles the study panel, which shows cross references, commentary, your notes and your tags for whatever is on screen.

Marking

Select text and choose a highlight: nine colours and six styles — fill, underline, double underline, box, circle, wavy. Margin marks are symbols in the Precept tradition. Highlights belong to the translation you made them in, because they are ranges of characters in a particular text; switch translation and a line at the foot of the chapter tells you what is marked in others and offers to take you there. Notes, by contrast, hold across every translation.

Legends turn highlighting into a method. In the study panel define a legend once — covenant = blue box — then apply it across a chapter, a book, a testament or the whole Bible in one action, matching by word or by Strong's number so it catches every form of the original.

To remove a highlight, tap it and choose Remove.

Notes

Press N on a passage, or open the Notes view. A note is a set of named fields in the method you use, not a blank page. Pick a template:

Notes take Markdown. Scripture references you type become links automatically, and [[double brackets]] link notes to each other, with backlinks shown. A verse with a note shows ✎ beside its number in the reader; tap it to read, edit or add another.

Tags

Tags (🏷) are a filing system you build yourself: groups with tags under them, and inside each tag the passages you filed in the order you chose. That order matters — a list of verses under Assurance is an argument, and an argument has a sequence.

/ searches Scripture, dictionaries, commentaries, your books, your notes and your documents in one query. The results draw the canon map, shaded by where the hits are; tap a book to narrow to it. Operators:

"exact phrase"the words in that order
grace OR mercyeither
faith -worksexclude a word
right*prefix: righteous, righteousness…
near/5 love fearwithin five words of each other
book:john in:nt genre:gospelnarrow by book, testament or genre
strong:H430every verse containing that original word
sense:love syn:mercy ant:lightthe Hebrew and Greek words behind an English one, their neighbours, their opposites

The buttons above the results (Old Testament, New, a genre) write the same filters into the box, so what you tapped stays visible and editable.

Compare and dig

Parallel shows up to six translations side by side, verse-aligned. Interlinear puts the original word, an English gloss, its Strong's number and its parsing under each word. Word study (tap any Strong's number) gives the lexicon entries, how the translators actually rendered the word and how often, where it clusters across the canon, and every occurrence — the concordance. Word senses (⇄) goes the other way: type an English word like love and see the four different original words behind it, with their synonyms and opposites, each labelled with the evidence for the relation. Harmony lays the Gospels side by side.

Studies

A study is a named container for a piece of work — the passages you are working through, the notes, canvases and structural work made inside it, and the layout you were reading in. Open one and everything you make files itself into it. The Studies view lists them; Export writes a single file you can import elsewhere, and Print / e-reader turns one into a document — HTML for paper or PDF, EPUB for a Kindle or Kobo, Markdown for anywhere.

The canvas is an infinite surface: drop passages, notes and dictionary articles onto it, connect them with labelled arrows (fulfills, quotes, contrasts…), and draw over it with a pen — P pen, E eraser, T sticky note, ⌘Z undo. The structure editor is for phrasing, arcing, bracketing, chiasm and outlines; Split by clause does the first pass.

Plans, memory and journal

Plans — seven reading plans (whole Bible, chronological, the New Testament in 90 days, the Gospels in a month, Psalms & Proverbs, and more) with progress and streaks. Memory — memorise verses on a spaced-repetition schedule with three drills: recall, first letters, and typing it out. Journal — dated entries with SOAP, ACTS and examen templates. Prayer log — a prayer list with what was asked and what was answered. My library — upload your own PDFs, EPUBs or Markdown; they are searchable, highlightable with the same legends, and any scripture reference inside them links back to the verse.

On a Kindle, Kobo or reMarkable

E-paper browsers cannot run the full app, so there is a second edition of it at /e/ on the same address — plain pages, no scripts, every page under 11 KB. It has reading with a translation switcher, comparison, search, per-verse study, word study, marking, notes, plans and your books. Marks and notes made there are the same records the full app uses. Aa in its bar sets text size, serif or sans, spacing and night mode, remembered on that device.

Your account

Open Account from the sidebar (or go to /account).

Your notes are yours. The owner can manage seats and invitations but is not given a way to read anyone's work.

Keyboard

⌘K / Ctrl-Kcommand palette — type what you want
/search
Ggo to a passage
J K or previous / next chapter
Istudy panel
Msidebar
Ddisplay settings
SStrong's numbers on / off
Vparagraph / verse / manuscript layout
Nnew note on this passage
Bbookmark
14focus a pane

Sign in · Your account