Lookup

Most of my writing inside the browser is done with the combination of the It’s All Text extension and Vim. During this writing, I use words whose meaning I know vaguely but don’t know the exact usage, and in such cases, I usually open a new browser window and look up the meaning of the word in an online dictionary. This process of looking up the dictionary meaning was getting rather tedious, so I wrote a small Vim plugin today to do this job with a simple command.

To use the plugin, first install BeautifulSoup. Then, get my lookup.vim script and copy it to ~/.vim/plugin/.. See the new version’s installation instructions, it now uses John Goerzen’s dict client implementation in Python.

Next time you use Vim, just place your cursor over any word and run :Lookup, and you’ll see something like this:

Since, this is the only command starting with L on my Vim installation, I just end up running :L. Of course, you can always create your own keyboard shortcuts to make it easier.

Update: Based on the comments, I’ve updated the script to now use the DICT protocol and talks to some servers. This avoids screen-scraping, is much faster to use, allows me to now use both a dictionary and a thesaurus which is very very handy because I can see what other words I can use, and of course, doesn’t violate any TOS (which screen-scraping could amount to).

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Posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Filed under categories: Python, Tech, Vim

10 Responses to “Lookup”

1. srid Says:
   August 26th, 2007 at 5:59 am

   By using wordnet, you can obviate internet connection and html scraping,
   http://nearfar.org/code/greclusters/dict.py

2. Abhijit Nadgouda Says:
   August 26th, 2007 at 7:54 am

   Good one, trying it out.

3. Michael Watkins Says:
   August 26th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

   And, if your client is *nix, you can ignore wordnet and all and simply use dict at the command line. In vim:

   function! LookupDictionary()
   let theword = expand(“”)
   exec ‘:!dict ‘ . theword
   endfunction

   ” Look up a word using dict
   nnoremap :call LookupDictionary()
   inoremap :call LookupDictionary()

4. Just another WordPress weblog Says:
   August 27th, 2007 at 1:16 am

   [...] Swaroop C H, The Dreamer » Python: Lookup [...]

5. Kartik Mistry Says:
   August 27th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

   Cool. I will love to write similar plugin for GujaratiLexicon.com.

6. Chris Says:
   August 28th, 2007 at 10:46 am

   This comment has just been written with “It’s All Text” and gvim, thanks for mentioning the former.

7. Swaroop Says:
   August 28th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

   @Sridhar: Thanks, didn’t know about that.

   @Michael: Nice idea, although I tend to be on Windows too. Perhaps, there are binaries for dict on gnuwin32.sf.net

   @Kartik: Should be easy

   @Abhijit, @Chris: Enjoy!

8. finferflu Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 1:03 am

   Hi, I’ve just donwloaded your cool plugin, but I was unable to lookup words. Then I found out that the server indicated in the code is currently not working, so I have edited it to dict.org, and I also had to change moby-thesaurus to moby-thes, this way (I hope BBCode is on):

   
   conn = dictclient.Connection('dict.org')
   
   output += "\n".join([d.getdefstr() for d in conn.define('wn', word)]) # WordNet
   output += "\n\n"
   output += "\n".join([d.getdefstr() for d in conn.define('moby-thes', word)]) # Moby Thesaurus
   

   It would be nice if you could update the plugin on the Vim website

9. Swaroop Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

   @finferflu : Thanks for pointing that out, and I’ve updated the plugin on the vim website

10. finferflu Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 5:58 pm

    Cool, thank you for your work