Paraphrase

Paraphrase is an opensource Christian prayer requests tracker for Linux programmed in Python and using PySide6. It was initially published on March 11, 2025. It was designed in order to fill a mobile app gap in the Linux mobile world. Its design was based originally on Logos Bible Software's built-in prayer app.

Its main window shows you a scrolling list of prayer requests you create and can write in Markdown. You can create prayer lists and assign prayer requests to different lists, mark prayers as prayed for that day, mark them as answered, set a due date, and set a schedule for recurring requests. Prayers can also have tags added to them for more complex sorting.

Additionally, the main pane utilizes an offline Bible reference tagger (https://gitlab.com/redemptionstudio/bible-ref-tagger) to allow users to read Bible passages they append to a prayer request. The Bible ref tagger is designed to use the LEB locally and to provide an additional link to a web service, such as Logos or BibleGateway, for other versions. Additional offline versions can be added, but these must be allowed to be shared robustly or public domain. Furthermore, there is a Bible reading pane so the user can read the Bible directly.

The settings pane allows customizing the UI window extensively.

There is also a prayer helps pane that consists of various quotes and the like to motivate the user in prayer.

Paraphrase is designed to be mobile-friendly.

All app data is stored in Markdown files on the user's system.

The storage directory is configured by a config.json file found in ~/.config/paraphrase.

There is also a CLI which can be run with: paraphrase tui or python ./main.py tui when running from source.

The plan is eventually to provide internationalization and devotional liturgies. At the time of writing, the app is on version 0.5.10.

The application title comes from George Herbert's poem "Prayer (I)".

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices; something understood.