It’s really handy to have a thesaurus handy when you’re writing, and of course if you’re writing in Emacs, you want to have that thesaurus available and easily accessible from Emacs. I’ve been using power thesaurus and its Emacs interface, powerthesaurus.el. It’s nice and works well but merely provides a list of synonyms from which you can choose a replacement for the word you’re looking up.
Recently, I saw a pointer to Ag Ibragimov’s mw-thesaurus. It’s an interface to the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus and is also quite nice. It’s strong point is that rather than a just list of synonyms, it provides a copy of the thesaurus page in Org format. That provides a lot of context and helps you zero in on the best substitute. On the downside, there’s no way to automatically substitute your choice in your text. That might seem like an odd omission but given the way it displays its results, it’s not clear how such a substitution would work.
In any event, I have them both installed at the moment. It’s not really much of an inconvenience to replace the word with its synonym manually. It’s certainly no harder than navigating to the proper synonym on the thesaurus page. On the other hand, it is convenient to be able to simply choose the word you want from a list with something like Ivy and have it automatically replace the word you’re looking up.
I’ll use them both until I decide which I like better. Or perhaps I’ll keep both installed and use the one that makes the most sense in a given situation.