Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has been doing more writing lately and has felt the need for a thesaurus. I very seldom use a thesaurus for reasons that I’ve written about previously but it’s sometimes convenient to have one. My typical use case is to avoid reusing the same word too often in close proximity. A thesaurus is good in that situation because I’m just interested in finding an alternative word, not shades of meaning.
Borkowski is trying to decide between two thesauruses, le-thesaurus and mw-thesaurus. Le-thesaurus provides a simple list of synonyms from which you can choose and it will automatically replace the word at point. Mw-thesaurus presents a nicely formatted buffer that gives synonyms and information about shades of meaning. It’s much more comprehensive than le-thesaurus but doesn’t automatically replace the word at point.
I have two thesauruses installed: mw-thesaurus and power thesaurus. Power thesaurus operates much like le-thesaurus but uses a community sourced thesaurus. I almost always use power thesaurus because it best fits my default use case and because when I want shades of meaning and context I turn to Websters 1913, most recently through the newly built-in dictionary-search.
Another problem with mw-thesaurus that I didn’t know about until I read Borkowski’s post is that it globally sets org-hide-emphasis-markers to t, which hides all Org emphasis markers in all buffers. That’s not something I want, and I’ve occasionally noticed it happening in the past but I didn’t know why. Borkowski solved that by editing the source code but perhaps there’s a better way.
Regardless of which one(s) you install, it’s often handy to have a thesaurus available without having to leave the comfort of Emacs. Any of those discussed here are fine and there are doubtless other good ones.