Rofi Dictionary ·

A dictionary program that uses Rofi's dMenu as an interface.

Context

From time to time, I'll get curious about the definition of a word I chance upon. To find the definition of the word, I then have to open up a web browser, then type in the search bar "define {word}". That's one step too many. Also I have to wait for the web browser to load up, and that's like nearly a second. I could do a lot in a second. Also I needed an excuse to make this program.

 

What does it do?

When the program is run, it launches Rofi and prompts for a word to define. Once the user has submitted a word, the program queries the Oxford Dictionary API and pulls up all the lexical categories (i.e. parts of speech) of the word. After selecting a category, the definitions under that category will be shown. Definitions can be selected to show the full definition if they are too long. You can press the escape key at any time to close out of the program.

 

Setup Instructions

You must have Rofi installed on your system. Check your distro's package manager to see how to install rofi.

 

First install all of the required libraries using the requirements.txt file in the repository:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

 

You will also need to set up a JSON file named app_values.json in the cloned repo. This will contain the app_key and app_id needed for the Oxford Dictionary API. To retrieve your values, create an account and application at the OxfordDictionary website. Once you've created your application, get your app_key and app_id from the API Credentials page.

Fill in the app_values.json file as so:

{
  "app_key": "APP KEY GOES HERE",
  "app_id": "APP ID GOES HERE"
}

 

Then simply run python rofi_dictionary.py in the cloned repo and it will start the script and launch Rofi. However, that isn't particularly practical, so instead I turned the script into a command by creating a symlink in /usr/bin and connecting it to the rofi_dictionary.py file. For those of you unfamiliar, you can do this with the following commands:

$ cd /usr/bin
$ sudo ln -s /path/to/repo/rofi_dictionary.py rofi_dict

You can set the command to be whatever you want - in the case above, I have it set to rofi_dict.

For even more accessibility, I added a key binding in my i3 config that runs the command with Mod+Shift+D.

bindsym $mod+Shift+D exec --no-startup-id rofi_dict

 

There's also a config.json file in the repo. If you open it up, you can see there are stored values with keys num_defns and chars_per_line. num_defns is the number of definitions that should show up for each lexical category. chars_per_line is the number of characters per row in Rofi before line wrapping. You can edit these as you see fit.

 

Improvements

Some improvements that I think would make the program better:

• Centered Rofi: I use the -fixed-num-lines option to minimize the height of the Rofi window, but that means that when the definitions show up, the window is not centered. I wasn't able to determine how to get Rofi to center itself dynamically when -fixed-num-lines was set.

• Better Dictionary Entries: Turns out there's a lot to dictionary APIs (like things called senses), and I didn't really understand all of it. With a better understanding of how the Oxford Dictionary API response is structured, I could augment the dictionary entries in the program.