Selah is a local-first journal for daily writing, prayer, sermons, and Scripture study. Every entry is saved as a .selah file — a plain text file you own, on a disk you choose, in a format that will outlast the app.
A journal entry. A sermon. A prayer. A testimony. A Bible study. They are all saved the same way — one small, self-contained file you can read, copy, back up, and keep.
It's a plain text file. Frontmatter at the top for title, date, and tags. Markdown below for the body. Nothing proprietary. Nothing hidden. You can open a .selah file in any text editor, today or twenty years from now.
.selah fileEvery entry is a plain text file on disk. Readable in any editor. Copyable with cp. Syncable with whatever you trust. Nothing trapped in a database.
No login. No cloud sync. No subscription that can run out. Your notes live in a folder you choose, on a disk you own.
One journal entry per day, kept in year and month folders. Every day you wrote is saved, and every day is kept — nothing ages out, nothing scrolls away.
Abba holds sermons, prayers, testimonies, events, and Bible studies — each in its own section. A home for the words that shape you.
Look up verses by reference, keep them beside your notes, and hold a running record of what God is teaching you. The Word, in the same archive as your walk with it.
Midnight is the default, but you can make Selah yours. Choose from over 70 built-in themes, tweak the colors, or drop in your own custom CSS to build the perfect writing environment.
Selah is a local-first application. That means your words are yours, and yours alone.
Selah is completely free and open source. The code is yours to inspect, compile, and improve.
"Be still, and know
that I am God."
Selah appears throughout the Psalms and other poetic passages of Scripture. Its exact meaning is debated, but it is often associated with a pause — a moment of reflection, a breath, a settling. It is a word that asks you to stop, if only for a moment, and let what you have just read or sung sink in.
That idea is the heart of this project: making room to slow down, write honestly, sit with Scripture, and remember the moments worth keeping. The .selah file is where those pauses live — a small, durable container for a single moment of attention. A prayer. A verse that struck you. A sermon that changed something. A day you do not want to forget.
Selah is not trying to grow your streak or gamify your consistency. It is not a productivity tool dressed in spiritual language. It is a place to sit with something until it has had time to mean what it means — and to keep it, faithfully, for as long as you need it.
Selah is free, open source, and always will be. Download it, read the code, suggest a feature, or just say hello.
Also just to state it and make the objective known for Selah,
the whole point of the project was just to make it easier and more minimal to journal without needing 1000 plugins just to fix something and then needing to fix or reorganize notes years later,
cause in obsidian i had a semi decent layout right but i also need 1000 plugins just for bible verses or even the journaling stuff or even asset management like for photos and other stuff like screenshots or literally whatever, with selah it manages all that for you while still being local, but then with obsidian months later thinking about making a new vault just because it got too messy or something right, the goal of it is just to make it so i never have to bother about it again years down the road, for generations to come, cause the reason i used these softwares or sites like obsidian or notion is for daily journaling and thats why thats the core function of it but also while having functions and abilities from notion like columns but again having the control like you have in obsidian with .md files but also while being able to have more with .selah and while being native
and as for the galleries, in obsidian i made a gallery type look with a plugin called dataview again but again the whole purpose of this software is that you dont need 1000 plugins that just slow stuff down in the end of the day, and even in obsidian it would freeze sometimes which made it really annoying to, so again the end goal of it all is that i can journal for decades to come to the point of even my future family can read these decades to come, and not have to worry about privacy like with notion being hosted in russia or something or even having to worry about online services shutting down and oh look you lost all your notes, thats why i loved obsidian but again got really messy.
point being. its just to make stuff simple and efficent and not as overwhelming cause near the end of it i was not wanting to journal cause of how obsidian was and it was just a repeated cycle of "maybe i should create a new vault"... i did that nearly like 5-10 times and thats not something you can just do, and not to mention notes from notion, i still have notes i need to transfer from a year ago.
it just makes life simple and enjoyable. thats the goal.