SwordSearcher 8.2 Released

SwordSearcher 8.2 is now available.

Be sure to try out the new Word Trees tool — a fun, unique way to see word and phrase connections in the Bible.

If you’re a SwordSearcher user already, go here for your upgrade.

Q2 2018

If you are using a version older than 8.0, be sure to watch the video that shows what’s new in SwordSearcher 8.

New Modules:

  • Joseph Sutcliffe’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1835) [Commentary module: Sutcliffe]
  • Reviving the Blessed Hope of Thessalonians (by Douglas Stauffer and Andrew Ray, 2016) [Book module: StauRBHT] A book-form commentary on 1st and 2nd Thessalonians. Includes 17 charts.
  • When the End Begins (by Douglas Stauffer and Andrew Ray, 2017) [Book module: StauWTEB] A book-form commentary on Matthew chapters 24 and 25. Includes 60 charts.

Major new features:

  • Bible Word Trees:Bible Word Trees in SwordSearcher
    • Bible Word Trees show fascinating connections between words and phrases in the Bible.
    • The Word Tree is a visualization tool (like the Word Cloud Generator) designed to help you see Bible search results in a very different way.
    • See groupings of the sentences and phrases flowing into and out of a word or phrase across the whole Bible or just chapters or books.
    • Connections between words and phrases can suddenly become obvious where they can be hard to spot in a conventional list of verses.
    • Fully interactive. Fast.
    • Integrated: load conventional verse lists and search results based on the word trees for further study.
    • See dozens of word tree previews for any portion of Scripture, like a chapter or book, to get ideas for additional exploration, or just to get a new birds-eye view of a passage.
  • Live verse tagging in the user module entry editor:
    • It is no longer necessary to save the text you are editing to see what will be automatically linked as a verse reference.
    • As you type, the editor will “live tag” any text that is recognized as a verse reference so you can see immediately what will be linked and it will instantly respond to any changes you make.
    • You can hold your mouse pointer over the live tag to see the text in a pop-up preview to verify it is what you intended.
    • Additional options when right-clicking a live-tagged reference in the editor.
    • Also added a handy keyboard shortcut for power users to insert a “contextual reference” at the caret position (Ctrl+R):
      • This inserts the book and chapter from the most recent verse reference recognized up to the caret position.
      • This is just a convenience keyboard shortcut to avoid the need to re-type book and chapter repeatedly when making a series of references broken up by other text.
  • Full-library Search Results display has been redesigned:
    • The layout of library search result previews has been improved.
    • More previews of matching text inside of entries are visible without taking up much more space.
    • Match previews also indicate how many individual matches there are in each entry, in addition to each module, so it is more obvious when an entry has multiple matches beyond what is visible in the preview.
    • Significant performance improvements.
  • Many additional optimizations and fixes. See the full revision history for detail.

Quick Tip: Viewing multiple matches from a Full Library Search

If you are doing exhaustive research, one of the tools you might use in SwordSearcher is the Full Library Search (found on the search menu). This lets you find words in your entire library, including books and commentaries, with just a few clicks. Here I am going to show you a very small change in SwordSearcher 8.1 that makes it easier to review search results:

After a Full Library Search, you are presented with a list of entries in your library that contain what you are looking for, along with a preview of the first match in the entry, like this:

Full Library Search results showing that Genesis 1:1 in the Ellicott commentary contains the word "condemned."
Full Library Search results showing that Genesis 1:1 in the Ellicott commentary contains the word “condemned.”

As you can see, there is a match in Genesis 1:1 in the Ellicott commentary. When clicked, the full entry is loaded in the commentary panel.

Now what is important to remember is that the search results are shown a lot like a web search– you only see the first match in the preview. But there may be more.

So in version 8.1, a small change was made to make it easier to cycle through multiple “hits” in the entry. Now there are two additional buttons on the toolbar for the Commentary panel that appear if you are viewing a search result:

The + and - buttons (circled) allow quick scrolling to each match in the entry. These buttons only appear when viewing search results in the panel.
The + and – buttons (circled) allow quick scrolling to each match in the entry. These buttons only appear when viewing search results in the panel.

You can also use the keyboard numeric keypad + and – keys to perform the same action. In fact, this has been possible in previous versions of SwordSearcher, but was hard to learn about without reading the manual. These new buttons make it a lot easier.

The buttons also appear when using the Verse Guide so that you can cycle over multiple verse references matching a verse in an entry.