Greetings, Fellow eSUrs,

I've been collecting ministry tools (you may remember that they used to be called "books") since high school. Some of my earliest treasures were Treasury of David by Spurgeon, Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (Bible cross references, often attributed to R.A. Torrey), my beloved Strong's Exhaustive Concordance ("Strong's for the strong, Young's for the young, Cruden's for the crude"!!), Old Testament History by Edersheim, and of course my old Scofield Reference Bible.

[NOTE: the happy fact that ALL of these resources are now FREELY available for e-Sword is not germane to the current discussion, believe it or not....]

By the time I was a Graduate Assistant in Expositional Studies, I had collected a sizable library. Due to the advice found in Dr. Cyril Barber's writings, I opted to organize my library via the Dewey Decimal system using a simple DOS based database system I created.

Now with 26 full shelves of books, I'm quite happy I spent the original work organizing my library. All my prophecy books are right there in section 236; Christian Family over there in 305-306; Greek textual criticism over there in 225.4, etc; but really, how often does a busy pastor really need to reference Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek by Westcott and Hort?

I created my own "Reference Shelf" that was organized via Dewey all by itself. Books I reference often, such as Linguistic Key to the Greek New Testament by Rienecker and Rogers, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (another eS freebie!), etc. AND - whatever series of expository studies I currently need get moved there, too.

January, 2010, I will begin an expository series in 1&2 Thessalonians. So all of my books on Thessalonians will be temporarily moved to the Reference section; I just finished Deuteronomy, so out it goes, back to the regular shelves. I think you get the idea.

Now, wouldn't it be great if we could do that with all of those hundreds (some of us have thousands!) of .topx files??!! A TOOL NOW EXISTS FOR YOU TO BE ABLE TO DO JUST THAT WITH E-SWORD!!

eSUr "Woschulz" has created what he calls "E-Sword Smart Starter (Basic)." Download Woschultz' E-Sword Smart Starter (basic) HERE!!

Here's what it allows you to do:

1. Start e-Sword with a pre-determined & limited set (Wolfgang calls them "sessions") of dictionaries, bibles, commentaries, and topics
2. easily change from one row of tabs (for .bblx, .dctx, .cmtx) to multiple rows of tabs, and then back again
3. arrange up to 6 different user defined "sessions" of organized and limited resource sets

Let me give you an example:

**I have 18 "bible" modules, but I only normally use 8.
**I have 31 "commentaries," but I only normally use 24.
**I have 36 "dictionaries," but I only normally use 32.
**I have 324 "topic" modules (and this list grows every week) - but most rarely get used.

So....

With "Smart Starter (basic)," I have the following sessions ready for immediate starting:

1. The first Default Tab - "Start E-Sword with all modules" (this doesn't count against one of your six user-defined sessions).
2. "NT Exposition" - no Hebrew Bibles, no Hebrew Dictionaries, no commentaries that are only OT (Keil & Delitzsch, etc.), and only the .topx modules that directly (or occasionally indirectly - my choice, right?) relate to NT study.
3. "OT Exposition" - no Greek NTs, no NT Dictionaries, no commentaries that are only NT (Barclay's DSB - NT), and only the .topx modules that relate to OT study.
4. "Daves's Faves" - my favorite .bblx, .dctx, .cmtx, and all my .topx modules. This is the tab that I generally use to start eS with.
5. "1&2 Thessalonians" - I get to choose the .bblx, .dctx, .cmtx - and most importantly, the .topx files I want. Do you understand what that means? Instead of scrolling through hundreds (some of us have thousands) of .topx files every time I'm studying, I only have the EXACT .topx files I want. Do you know how many .topx files exist that have direct bearing on Thessalonians? Less than a dozen!! And now I won't lose any of them!
6. AND I still have two more sessions to build! How great is that?!

This little gizmo is simple to use, but oh! so very powerful! This thing should be required installation for all eS "power users," and don't be surprised if Rick figures out some way to utilize this tool (or this type of tool) into a future version of eS (9.6.1, Mr. Rick?!). Yep, it's that good.

Wolfgang, thank you so very much for the best 3rd party tool e-Sword has ever seen.

Dave

ps - Wolfgang, what will "Smart Starter (plus/advanced)" include??!! Help in ironing my shirt??!!

pps - Wolfgang, is it ready yet?

ppps - Wolfgang, that last "pps", I was just kidding....