Most of my writing inside the browser is done with the combination of the It’s
All Text extension and
Vim. During this writing, I use words whose meaning I know vaguely but don’t
know the exact usage, and in such cases, I usually open a new browser window and
look up the meaning of the word in an online dictionary. This process of looking
up the dictionary meaning was getting rather tedious, so I wrote a small Vim
plugin today to do this job with a simple command.
To use the plugin, first install. See the new version’s installation instructions, it now uses John Goerzen’s dict client implementation in Python.
BeautifulSoup. Then, get my
lookup.vim script and
copy it to ~/.vim/plugin/.
Next time you use Vim, just place your cursor over any word and run :Lookup,
and you’ll see something like this:
Since, this is the only command starting with L on my Vim installation, I just
end up running :L. Of course, you can always create your own keyboard
shortcuts to make it easier.
Update: Based on the comments, I’ve updated the script to now use the DICT protocol and talks to some servers. This avoids screen-scraping, is much faster to use, allows me to now use both a dictionary and a thesaurus which is very very handy because I can see what other words I can use, and of course, doesn’t violate any TOS (which screen-scraping could amount to).
