Catena Vetus

A Terminal User Interface frontend for Historical Christian Commentaries which does not require an internet connection. This software is best used with a mouse, if you intend to use the table of contents, otherwise a keyboard will serve you well!

Gallery

Credits

• @emeth- without whom this project would be impossible! This project utilises his massive database!
• @davep for helping me with textual.
• Everyone on the Catholic Diocese of Discord!

Setup

I'd thoroughly recommend you use a powerful terminal for this. Your default system one probably won't be the best experience. On Windows, go ahead and get a copy of Windows Terminal. On Linux, get a copy of Alacritty.

Pre-made binaries

If you are windows you can download the pyinstaller exe file and the database file from the releases page. Place these in the same folder (make sure the database file is called commentaries.db). Then open a Powershell window (preferably use Windows Terminal because it will work far better) in the same directory and execute the exe.

Running with classical Python tools

1. Download a copy of the code from GitHub ( Follow this guide if you are unsure how to do this)
2. Unzip this into a new folder ( Follow this windows guide if you are unsure how to do this).
3. Install a copy of Python 3 (Head to python.org if you are unsure how to do this) . You need a version >=3.9.
4. Open a terminal and head to the folder you downloaded this software to. Run python -m venv venv and then if you are on Windows .\venv\Scripts\activate and if on unix source ./venv/bin/activate.
5. Type pip install -e .
6. Either download the database from the releases page or compile your own. Move the database file to be in the same folder as main.py with the name commentaries.db.
7. Run from your terminal window python main.py.
8. Enjoy!

Developers

This section of the guide presumes thorough knowledge of the Python ecosystem.

pipx install poetry
pipx inject poetry poetry-pyinstaller-plugin

Building a binary

poetry build

The compiled software will be available under ./dist/.

Running the tests

poetry run pytest

Running the tests (classical)

pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest