Nine Point Labs
The Word from Ninepoint Labs

Bahá’í Reader: A Quiet GTK 4 Reader That Follows Your Desktop Theme

· 2 min read

Bahá'í Reader social card

Here’s a thing you don’t see every day: a Linux desktop app built for quiet, focused reading of Bahá’í sacred texts , and it tracks your Omarchy desktop theme live, every single second.

Bahá’í Reader is a standalone GTK 4 app. No shell plugin required. No Omarchy dependency , it just reads your desktop’s colors.toml and follows along. Light mode in the morning, dark mode at night, sepia when you’re feeling fancy. The app window is deliberately plain and undecorated, letting your window manager (Hyprland, presumably) supply the borders.

What’s inside

English ships with all ten collections available from BahaiPrayers.net , 2,616 records covering Prayers, Hidden Words (Arabic and Persian divisions), Gleanings, the Kitáb-i-Íqán, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, and more. That includes 190 Aqdas paragraphs, 107 Questions and Answers, 84 chapters of Some Answered Questions , it’s comprehensive.

Beyond English, the app catalogs 112 prayer languages. Pick one, download its collections, and you’re reading offline. Everything’s stored as permanent user data, not cache. A failed download leaves existing content untouched.

The feature list that matters

  • Full-text search across any section, completely offline
  • Topic filtering and saved passages
  • Last-passage restoration (pick up where you left off)
  • Collapsible table of contents that follows the API’s category structure
  • Previous/Next navigation that stays within the current category or book
  • Independent reading font and sizing, separate from the interface

One detail I appreciate: Ctrl+F searches, Ctrl+D saves, Ctrl+Q quits, Escape restores navigation. The keyboard shortcuts are sensible and discoverable.

Why it’s neat

Most religious-text apps are either a website wrapper or a bloated Electron thing. Bahá’í Reader is neither , it’s a native GTK 4 window, a Python script (reader.py), and local data files. The whole install is a single .deb, .rpm, or .pkg.tar.zst package. There’s even an AppImage if you’re into that.

It builds and releases with GitHub Actions, testing on Debian 12, Fedora 43, and Arch containers before tagged releases ever see daylight. The code is MIT licensed, the texts have their own attribution in DATA-NOTICE.md, and everything’s cleanly separated.

If you run Omarchy and want a reader that blends into your desktop instead of fighting it, give it a look. Grab the latest release and see if it fits.

Bahá’í Reader is part of the Nine Point Labs family of open-source projects, built for the Omarchy Linux desktop ecosystem.