Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Arthur Miller]

Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> writes:

> * Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> [2020-09-29 17:25]:
>> > Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2020 08:45:46 +0300
>> > From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
>> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com,
>> >   rms@gnu.org, drew.adams@oracle.com
>> > 
>> > > Btw, we have a similar functionality built in: try "M-s M-w" after
>> > > marking a word or a phrase.
>> > 
>> > I did not know, that is good to search words online, it does not
>> > really define words, it searches for whatever is marked, that is
>> > good. It is not a dictionary though.
>> 
>> First, what it does by default has an advantage of being able to look
>> up phrases, not just words.
>> 
>> And second, you can customize eww-search-prefix in a way that will
>> search dictionaries: for example Google does that when the query
>> begins with "define:"
>
> Similar like that, yet, looking up word online would be a fallback.
> First would need to come local dictionaries, as majority of the world
> is offline. A student in East Africa is regarding online use very
> disabled. Majority of schools in this world are poor schools. Reality
> is quite different globally. Offline dictionaries need no network. If
> offline dictionaries are not available, then online would be used,
> that is done automatically by dict/dico clients, and then if none of
> clients exists, then the online lookup could ask for !define word in
> Duckduck.com or similar.
>
>> > There are hard coded settings for Google Chrome browser in {M-x 
>> > customize-group RET browse-url RET}
>> > in Emacs, so why not have hard coded settings for dictionary features.
>> 
>> That is a completely separate issue: you are talking about setting up
>> the dictionary _servers_ to which the client will talk, something that
>> IMO should be entirely up to the Emacs users.
>
> Yes, analogous is the Google Chrome browser, it is up to user to
> install it, but settings are available in Emacs. It would be up to
> user to install dict server, but settings could be, if possible, put in
> Emacs.

I would like to have an easy to loookup dictionary from Lisp posibly for
automatically translating of GUI ites. I have always thought of creating
an sqlite database of "programming" dictionary where some common gui
items are put together like (file, menu, cut, copy, paste, etc) and
indexed for use in programms. In a Lisp program sqlite is not even
needed.

I have no idea how those dictionary servers work, never used one, but
maybe it is something applications could use to translate software too;
at least simpler part like some common GUI stuff.