Getting Websters

We are going to download the dictionary from J Somer's S3 bucket. Uncompress this thing (which looks like an MacOS Application) then uncompress the dictionary inside, and move it to a newly created ~/.stardict/dic directory.

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mkdir -p ~/.stardict/dic
cd /tmp
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/jsomers/dictionary.zip
unzip dictionary.zip
tar -xjf dictionary/stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2.tar.bz2 
mv stardict-dictd-web1913-2.4.2 ~/.stardict/dic/

Using debian, you need to install the sdcv command package. Emacs will talk to this once we are all up and running.

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sudo apt install sdcv -y

Test this with sdcv billow or whatever word you fancy.

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cd ~/.emacs.d
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gucong/emacs-sdcv/master/sdcv-mode.el

And then in your .emacs file:

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(load-file "~/.emacs.d/sdcv-mode.el")
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c s") 'sdcv-search)

This binds C-c s to search, or you can use M-x sdcv-search to look up the word you want – or a word that you lack the power or knowledge of.

1. http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
2. https://irreal.org/blog/?p=9035
3. http://mbork.pl/2017-01-14_I'm_now_using_the_right_dictionary