{"id":11241,"date":"2023-03-26T13:21:07","date_gmt":"2023-03-26T17:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11241"},"modified":"2023-03-26T13:21:07","modified_gmt":"2023-03-26T17:21:07","slug":"adding-a-thesaurus-to-emacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11241","title":{"rendered":"Adding A Thesaurus To Emacs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has been doing more writing lately and has felt the need for a thesaurus<\/a>. I very seldom use a thesaurus for reasons that I\u2019ve written about previously<\/a> but it\u2019s 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\u2019m just interested in finding an alternative word, not shades of meaning.<\/p>\n

Borkowski is trying to decide between two thesauruses, le-thesaurus<\/a> and mw-thesaurus<\/a>. 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\u2019s much more comprehensive than le-thesaurus but doesn\u2019t automatically replace the word at point.<\/p>\n

I have two thesauruses installed: mw-thesaurus and power thesaurus<\/a>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another problem with mw-thesaurus that I didn\u2019t know about until I read Borkowski\u2019s post is that it globally sets org-hide-emphasis-markers<\/code> to t<\/code>, which hides all Org emphasis markers in all buffers. That\u2019s not something I want, and I\u2019ve occasionally noticed it happening in the past but I didn\u2019t know why. Borkowski solved that by editing the source code but perhaps there\u2019s a better way.<\/p>\n

Regardless of which one(s) you install, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ve written about previously but it\u2019s sometimes convenient to have one. My typical use … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,4],"class_list":["post-11241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-org-mode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11242,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11241\/revisions\/11242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}