4.3 KiB
StarDict Terminal UI
sdtui aims to provide an easy way of viewing translation as well as other kinds of dictionaries in your terminal. I wasn’t successful in finding any free dictionary 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. I wasn’t able to reuse anything.
Further Development
While I’ve been successfully using sdtui for a long time now, some work has to be done yet before the software can be considered fit for inclusion in regular Linux and/or BSD distributions. Help is much appreciated.
An approximate list of things that need to be resolved:
-
rewrite the frontend using a proper TUI framework
-
possibly make it work better with multiple dictionaries as now it’s only acceptable if you give them short names in the configuration so that they all fit in the header
-
figure out a way to become capable of displaying most dictionaries
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, or from openSUSE Build Service for the rest of mainstream distributions. Consult the list of repositories and their respective links at:
Building and Running
Build dependencies: CMake, pkg-config, xsltproc, docbook-xsl
Runtime dependencies: ncursesw, zlib, ICU, termo (included),
glib-2.0, pango, gtk+ (optional, any version)
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/pjanouch/sdtui.git $ mkdir sdtui/build $ cd sdtui/build $ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DWITH_GTK=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
Note that for versions of CMake before 2.8.9, you need to prefix cpack with
fakeroot or file ownership will end up wrong.
Having the program installed, simply run it with a StarDict .ifo file as an argument. It is however highly recommended to configure it, see below.
Extensions
As the original StarDict is a bit of a clusterfuck with regard to collation of
dictionary entries, I had to introduce an additional collation field into the
.ifo file. When sdtui discovers this field while reading the dictionary, it
automatically reorders the index according to that locale (e.g. "cs_CZ").
This operation may take a little while, in the order of seconds.
Configuration
To get a nicer look in 256color terminals, create ~/.config/sdtui/sdtui.conf with the following. Note that it is intended for black-on-white terminals.
[Settings] center-search = true underline-last = false hl-common-prefix = true watch-selection = true [Colors] header = reverse header-active = ul search = ul even = 16 231 odd = 16 255
The watch-selection option makes the application watch the X11 primary
selection for changes and automatically search for selected text.
This feature requires GTK+ and it will never work on Wayland by its design.
You can also set up some dictionaries to be loaded at startup automatically:
[Dictionaries] name1 = ~/path/to/dict.ifo name2 = ~/another/dict.ifo
Dictionaries
Unfortunately this application only really works with specific dictionaries. Word definitions have to be in plain text, separated by newlines.
Contributing and Support
Use this project’s GitHub to report any bugs, request features, or submit pull requests. If you want to discuss this project, or maybe just hang out with the developer, feel free to join me at irc://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.
License
sdtui is written by Přemysl Janouch <p.janouch@gmail.com>.
You may use the software under the terms of the ISC license, the text of which is included within the package, or, at your option, you may relicense the work under the MIT or the Modified BSD License, as listed at the following site: