What is `kamusi'?
=================

"Kamusi" is the Kiswahili term for dictionary. Kamusi is a
command-line interface to the Kiswahili-English Dictionary provided
online at http://www.kamusi.org/. They have a fairly extensive list of
Kiswahili words, in part with attached examples and notes. The raw
data is freely available. This program converts the text files to a
SQLite database and provides a command-line interface to search for
words in that database.

Primarily I wrote this program to avoid loading times of the website
and use the keyboard more effectively. When I read Kiswahili texts or
write emails, I often keep a terminal open on a second screen to
quickly look up words.

Preparing kamusi
================

First of all, you need to download the required word files. They are
located in plain text on the kamusi web page. Unless shipped with this
script, run the following command:

    $ xargs wget -q < kamusi_dictionary_files

You should then have two files, `eall.txt' and `sall.txt', in the
current working directory.

The next step is to convert these files (which have an arguably
strange syntax) to an SQLite database. Use convert.pl for this job:

    $ ./convert.pl

The command expects the files to be called {s,e}all.txt in the CWD and
will create a file `words.db' in CWD. Be prepared to wait a minute or
so for this process to end, since the two files have 800,000+ lines of
text that must be converted. (Once you did this step, however, kamusi
will be very fast indeed.)

Using kamusi
============

Simply invoke the kamusi program with ./kamusi. If you decide to move
the kamusi script to $HOME/bin, either place the `words.db' file in
$HOME/.kamusi or pass the call the -D option, i.e.:

    $ kamusi -D /path/to/words.db

For further usage information, refer to the USAGE file.