If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a dictionary for finding just the right word, sometimes a thesaurus can be really handy.
Today, I saw an announcement by Valeriy Savchenko about his new Emacs package that provides an interface to the Power Thesaurus Website. The Power Thesaurus site is a crowd sourced thesaurus that appears to be pretty comprehensive. If you give it a word, it returns a list of synonyms. Savchenko’s package provides an easy way to query the site from within Emacs. If there is an active region, the package will use that word. If there is no region, it asks you for the word. In either case, it inserts the word at point, replacing the region if there is one. Savchenko has an animated gif that demonstrates its use.
Some of the comments to Savchenko’s announcement complained that the package depends on a third party site but that also has some advantages such as not requiring storage on your system and, being crowd sourced, always undergoing improvement. In any event, the situation is the same as with abo-abo’s define-word, which depends on Wordnik and which I use many times a day without any problems.
I’ve installed it and bound it to Hyper+p. Obviously, I don’t have much experience with it yet but it seems work as advertised.