osx-dictionary.el's Introduction

OSX Dictionary.app interface for Emacs

Introduction

osx-dictionary is inspired by dictionary.vim. osx-dictionary provides functions which invoke Dictionary.app from Mac OS X.

Notes: translation between Chinese and English is well supported.

Requirement

chinese-word-at-point to get (most likely) Chinese word under the cursor

If you don't use Chinese, no needs to care about it, features provided by chinese-word-at-point is disabled by default.

Install

osx-dictionary is available on Melpa, and that's the recommended way of installing it, i.e.

M-x package-install RET osx-dictionary RET

In this way, the requirement, chinese-word-at-point, will be installed automatically.

Usage

Below are commands you can use:

osx-dictionary-search-input Search input word and display result with buffer
osx-dictionary-search-pointer Search word around and display result with buffer

GNU Emacs itself has no idea what a Chinese word is, If you want Emacs to get Chinese word under the cursor, you have to set osx-dictionary-use-chinese-text-segmentation to t by yourself. Please refer to chinese-word-at-point for more info.

Below is my configuration for this package:

;; Support Chinese word
(setq osx-dictionary-use-chinese-text-segmentation t)

;; Key bindings
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c d") 'osx-dictionary-search-pointer)
;; (global-set-key (kbd "C-c i") 'osx-dictionary-search-input)

;; Work with popwin-el (https://github.com/m2ym/popwin-el)
;; (push "*osx-dictionary*" popwin:special-display-config)

Here is a screenshot of a sample usage:

Todo

Save search history
Improve regex for highlight
- Add more keywords, for example, "名" and "代"
- Adopt more precise matching
Use Chinese text segmentation for better Chinese translation

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