Irreal

My go to Emacs in-line dictionary is abo-abo’s define-word. It pops up a definition of the word at point in the minibuffer. I use it several times a day. Lately, though, it has been returning “zero definitions found” on every invocation. This problem predated my update to Emacs 31.1 so it’s not related to the version of Emacs.

Today (Tuesday) I finally got fed up and decided to track down the problem. It wasn’t too hard. It turns out that the problem is that define-word calls the on-line dictionaries with HTTP rather than HTTPS and the sites are rejecting the connections. There’s already a pull request (2026-08-22) for the fix but as of today (2026-08-25) it hasn’t been merged or uploaded to MELPA.

I messed around for a while but couldn’t get any of the obvious solutions to work so I gave up and added

  :init
  ;; Until define-word is updated in MELPA
  (defcustom define-word-services
    '((wordnik "https://wordnik.com/words/%s" define-word--parse-wordnik)
      (openthesaurus "https://www.openthesaurus.de/synonyme/%s" define-word--parse-openthesaurus)
      (webster "https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/%s" define-word--parse-webster)
      (offline-wikitionary define-word--get-offline-wikitionary nil))
    "Services for define-word, A list of lists of the
  format (symbol url function-for-parsing).
Instead of an url string, url can be a custom function for retrieving results."
    :type '(alist
            :key-type (symbol :tag "Name of service")
            :value-type (group
                         (string :tag "Url (%s denotes search word)")
                         (function :tag "Parsing function"))))

to the use-package for define-word. That’s just a copy of the definition of define-word-services from the define-word source. Note that it’s important that it goes in the :init section so that the definition gets established before define-word is loaded.

It’s a messy solution but it will do until the fix is merged and percolates up to MELPA.

Happy news this morning. Sean Whitton has announced the release of Emacs 31.1. As usual, it’s available at the mirror nearest you. Note, however, that the URLs in Whitton’s announcement have a typo. See this message from Eli for the correct URLs.

I’m writing this with the just built new Emacs and everything seems fine. I had a bit of trouble downloading the source because, apparently, some of the mirrors haven’t updated yet. If that happens to you, just repeat the request a time or two and you should get everything. After that, enjoy your new Emacs and all the goodies it brings. As always, Mickey has his usual exegesis of the changes.

As I invariably say at times like this, Eli and the rest of the development team deserve our huge thanks for their selfless efforts on our behalf.

Charles Choi has announced the release of Casual 3.0. There are now 26 modules in the Casual suite but this release is about providing an easier setup for the suite. Prior to this release, each module had to be set up separately. As Choi says, that made sense when there were just a few modules but it has become increasingly burdensome as the number of modules grew.

The new procedure is simply to call casual-init and all the module’s you want to use are initialized. The modules you’re using is determined by a set of hook functions that can configured with the Emacs Customize utility. You simple check off which modules you want to use and call casual-init. That’s all there is to it. You can learn more about this in the Casual User Manual.

If you’ve been following along on Choi’s blog—or to a lessor extent on Irreal—you know that there are a lot of different types of modules, not all of which you might want installed. The Customize interface is an easy way to specify which ones you want.

The latest version is available on MELPA and NonGNU ELPA. The nice thing about the modules is that they are all invoked with the same key sequence, Ctrl+o by default, so you don’t have to remember a bunch of different bindings. Once you invoke it, Casual brings up a Transient menu appropriate for the current major mode

Casual is a nice suite that make it easier to navigate Emacs applications that you don’t use often and for which you haven’t internalized all the bindings. Take a look at the user manual if you want to know more.

Álvaro Ramírez, author of Journelly and many other useful applications—a lot of them Emacs based—has a new post about a basic Emacs operation: changing focus to another window. Ramírez and I basically agree about things like this although he stubbornly refuses to admit the superiority of my method of indicating the window that has focus.

Now he has a slightly different problem. For technical reasons that you can read about in his post, he wants to be able to switch to a window in another frame. The other-window command, bound to Ctrl+x o by default, doesn’t consider windows in other frames but, of course, there’s a command for that: next-window-any-frame. That turned out to be exactly what Ramírez needed and he simply bound it to Meta+o, which is where he had other-window bound.

Like Ramírez, I seldom use more than one frame so I didn’t know about this command. If you often have more than one frame going, you may find it useful if you’re not already using it. If you’re an ace-window user, it will consider all frames by default but you can adjust this with aw-scope.

Great news! Sean Whitton writes to announce the release of Emacs 31.1 RC1. This is the final step before the formal release of the Emacs 31 series. Whitton remarks that the developers are hoping that RC1 will be the only release candidate. I take that as a measure of their confidence in this trial release. Unless any breaking problems pop up, we can expect the official release of 31.1 imminently.

As always, we should offer up a word of thanks for the hard work of the maintainers and all the developers who have toiled so hard to bring us this latest release. If we find ourselves in the same bar as one of them, the drinks are on us.