Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2020 23:51:10 -0400
> 
>   > What is missing in dictionary.el?  It is implemented in Emacs Lisp, I 
> just 
>   > tried it (apt-get install elpa-dictionary), and it seems to work fine. 
> 
> How does it work?

Similar to smtpmail.el: connects to a server (whose URL is
customizable) and talks to it using the DICT protocol.

>   > The default server is dict.org, port 2628,
> 
> We should not refer people to someone else's server as the first,
> recommended way of looking up words in a dictionary.
> 
> The first option should be referring to a dictionary
> on your own machine.  It should support the formats that
> are widely used.

We could implement an initialization function that tests whether
there's a local DICT server, and if there is, use that.  That could be
triggered by a special value of the defcustom that names the server.