Ben Simon has a post that hits two of my blogging hobby horses at once. The post is about his recent adoption of define-word and powerthesaurus. The first way it resonates with me is that Simon, like me, finally got sick of doing things the hard way and implemented a simple solution within Emacs. Like me, once he made the change, he wondered why it took him so long.
In his case, it was changing focus to Google to lookup the definition of a word or to use an online thesaurus to find synonyms. That’s just silly, of course. Emacs has all sorts of packages that will do that—and do it interactively—for you without leaving Emacs.
The second thing that resonated was the solutions he selected. Simon’s choices were the same as mine. He used abo-abo’s define-word for word definitions and Valeriy Savchenko’s powerthesaurus for finding synonyms. They’re good choices and have served me well. As I’ve related many times—most recently here—I also use the Webster 1913 dictionary (usually instead of a thesaurus) to find just the right word. As of Emacs 28, that’s particularly easy and doesn’t even require a package.
My only “complaint” is the Simon chooses to check spelling with ispell-word (bound to Meta+$) instead of just enabling Fly Spell, which automatically checks spelling. I think it’s better than using ispell-word because it finds errors even if you don’t suspect there is one. When Fly Spell finds one, you can use flyspell-auto-correct-previous-word (bound to Ctrl+;) to correct the error. It’s a nice solution that I’ve used constantly for many years.