Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about dictionary and thesaurus apps for Emacs. Like many of us—or, perhaps, most of us—Zamansky uses Emacs for almost every chore that involves text: he reads and writes his email with it, he reads his RSS feed with it, and he writes his blog with it. Up until now, he hasn’t integrated a dictionary app into his workflow. He usually just switches to his browser and looks up the word in one of the on-line dictionaries.
That, he says, is kind of lame so he wants to be able to look up words from Emacs. I’ve been doing that ever since abo-abo introduced his excellent define-word package. I use it multiple times a day either to check a definition or as a backup to flyspell, which on my machine takes a conservative view and often produces false positives. Its use is so integrated into my workflow that even when I’m not in Emacs, I’ll switch to it so I can look up a word. I get annoyed when I’m on my iPad or iPhone and have to use some other method of looking up a word.
Zamansky settled on the dictionary package. It’s a nice package and easy to use. It’s also more flexible than define-word because it can handle several dictionaries. You can even have a local dictionary server if you’re off-line a lot.
For his thesaurus, he looked at powerthesaurus and synosaurus. He settled on synosaurus while I’m using powerthesaurus. Either one seems a good choice. Synosaurus can use either a local thesaurus (Wordnet, which must be installed separately) or the on-line OpenThesaurus, which does not appear to support English synonyms.
I found this video particularly useful. In the first place, it reminded me about the try package, which is useful to easily experiment with packages before committing them to your configuration. Because Zamansky learned about powerthesaurus from Irreal, it’s a nice bit of what goes around comes around that I learned something about the package from his video. It turns out the powerthesaurus-lookup-word-dwim command is much more useful than the powerthesaurus-lookup-word command that I had been using.
Finally, no discussion of Emacs dictionaries could be complete without—again—mentioning Draft #4 and why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. If you do any type of creative writing you should definitely follow the above link and see what you’re missing. Pointers for installing the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary and the necessary software is available here.
The video is just short of eleven and a half minutes so it should fit easily into a coffee break. If you don’t yet have a dictionary and thesaurus interface in Emacs you should definitely watch this video. Even if you do have apps installed, watch it anyway: you may, like me, learn something new.