I do a lot of writing, almost all of it in Emacs so I’m always happy to see how other people use our editor of choice for writing. The latest example I’ve found is from JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why. His post considers some simple expansion functions in Emacs.
He starts off with dictionaries. As many of you know, I’ve been a Webster 1913 dictionary user ever since James Somers explained why I (and you) should be. I have gone through many iterations of integrating it into Emacs but have converged on the same solution that JTR uses: the built in dictionary-search function built into Emacs that we both have configured to use the online collection dict.org, although I still have a local copy from my previous iterations.
The dict.org collection is nice because it contains several dictionaries besides Webster’s, and dictionary-search will return entries from all of them that have the word you’re looking for. The best part is that it’s trivial to set up You don’t have to download dictionaries or packages. You simply set a variable saying you want to use dict.org and that’s it. There are some nuances with that so be sure to read JTR’s post or the documentation.
JTR’s post is worth reading just for his dictionary advice but there’s more.
Next he briefly discusses Hippie Expand, a way of completing words based on a list of functions that you can specify. I’ve been using it for a long time, but his list of completion functions was more complete than mine so I stole it.
Finally, he considers ispell. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I recently started using Jinx instead of ispell but JTR showed me a couple of things I didn’t know about. I’ve always used ispell with flyspell so I never learned some of its extra tricks. One of those is a sort of fuzzy search for a word you’re not sure how to spell. That happens to me a lot so I was glad to find out about ispell’s ability to handle it.
The other thing you can do with ispell is to use it as a quick way of doing a replace. Take a look at JTR’s post for more on both those functions.
JTR’s post is from last week so Sacha will doubtless cover it before you see this but I had a lot to say about it so I decided to write about it anyway. It’s definitely worth a careful reading.