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StarDict Terminal UI

sdtui aims to provide an easy way of viewing translation as well as other kinds of dictionaries in your terminal, and is inspired by the dictionary component of PC Translator. I wasn’t successful in finding any free software of this kind, GUI or not, and thus decided to write my own.

The project is covered by a permissive license, unlike vast majority of other similar projects, and can serve as a base for implementing other dictionary software.

sdtui

Packages

Regular releases are sporadic. git master should be stable enough. You can get a package with the latest development version from Archlinux’s AUR.

Documentation

See the man page for information about usage. The rest of this README will concern itself with externalities.

Building and Running

Build dependencies: CMake, pkg-config, asciidoctor
Runtime dependencies: ncursesw, zlib, ICU, termo (included), glib-2.0 >= 2.38, pango, xcb, xcb-xfixes (the latter two optional)

$ git clone --recursive https://git.janouch.name/p/sdtui.git
$ mkdir sdtui/build
$ cd sdtui/build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DWITH_X11=ON
$ make

To install the application, you can do either the usual:

# make install

Or you can try telling CMake to make a package for you. For Debian it is:

$ cpack -G DEB
# dpkg -i sdtui-*.deb

Having the program installed, simply run it with a StarDict .ifo file as an argument. It is, however, preferable to configure it to load your dictionaries automatically.

Dictionaries

Unfortunately, this application only really works with specific dictionaries. Word definitions have to be in plain text, separated by newlines.

The make dicts command will build some examples from freely available sources.

You may use the included transform tool to convert already existing dictionaries that are almost good as they are, e.g., after stripping XML tags. You might want to fix up the sametypesequence of the resulting .ifo file afterwards, and run dictzip on the resulting .dict file to make it compact.

Further Development

While I’ve been successfully using sdtui for many years now, some work has to be done yet before the software can be considered fit for inclusion in regular Linux and/or BSD distributions.

An approximate list of things that need to be resolved is as follows:

  • the tab bar and the text input field don’t handle overflows well,

  • figure out a way to become capable of displaying most StarDict dictionaries.

Given the entangledness of this codebase, issues with the file format, and general undesirability of terminal UIs, it might be better to start anew.

Contributing and Support

Use https://git.janouch.name/p/sdtui to report any bugs, request features, or submit pull requests. git send-email is tolerated. If you want to discuss the project, feel free to join me at ircs://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.

Bitcoin donations are accepted at: 12r5uEWEgcHC46xd64tt3hHt9EUvYYDHe9

License

This software is released under the terms of the 0BSD license, the text of which is included within the package along with the list of authors.