Copyright (c) 1998 Scott W. Gifford <sgifford@tir.com>
Word Inspector is a graphical front-end to the "dict" program. The dict program allows you to search through one or more dictionary-like reference books for a word, then displays its definition. Word Inspector expands that by allowing you to enter words to look up more easily, easily look up words that appear in the definition for another word, and automatically look up a word in the X Windows selection.
It was written by Scott Gifford.
Word Inspector uses the GTK+ library (http://www.gtk.org/) for its user interface, and was built with the Glade interface builder (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~damon/builder/index.html).
Once you have done that, you should be able to install Word Inspector it with the usual
./configure
make
make install
described (generically) in INSTALL. You may get a couple warnings about unused functions; these are left over from the beta version of Glade I used to develop.
Most configuration of Word Inspector is currently done by configuring dict. See the documentation accompanying that package for more information. I hope to include a GUI configuration tool in a future version.
If you're not the reading type, at this point you can run
wordinspect
to see the GUI (try button 3), and
wordinspect --help
to see what command-line options you have, then skip to the end of
this section to see some interesting things you can do.
Once you have installed it (presumably into your PATH), you can run it by typing "wordinspect." Of course, you may find it more convenient to add it to your X Windows menu (or however you like to launch programs). This will bring up a the "Word Finder" window, which allows you to enter a word to look up. Simply enter the word you want to look up, and hit Enter or the "Search" button. Word Inspector will pause while it looks up the word, then pop up a new window with the definition if it could find it, or some suggestions if it couldn't. If it can't find anything that even resembles the word you entered, it will display a window letting you know that, too.
In any Word Inspector window, you can right-click (button 3) on a word to get a menu of various ways to get more information on that word. Currently, the two choices are to define the word (look it up directly), or search for it (pop up a search window with that word entered in it). If you want to look up a multi-word phrase, select the phrase with the button 1, as if you were going to paste it into another window, then right-click on the selection to see the same menu for the entire phrase. Spaces, newlines, and punctuation are automatically removed from your selection, to help dict find it.
Of course, you can copy any information you'd like from the Word Inspector window for pasting into other applications. Like in most X applications, hilighting the words with the button 1 makes it the primary selection, and you don't have to hit anything to paste it into another application.
When you are finished reading the definition for a word, click on the "OK" button at the bottom to get rid of the window. If you searched for a word, you can search for another one by just replacing the word you typed and hitting Enter or Search again. Word Inspector won't exit until you have closed all of its windows, so you can close anything (including Word Finder windows) at any time.
You can also pass various options to wordinspect on the command-line. A few useful ones are:
--help: Display all options available for wordinspect.
--version: Display wordinspect's current version and copyright.
--search: Search for the word provided on the command line
[Default].
--define: Define the word provided on the command line.
--clipboard: Use the word currently in X's primary selection (the
clipboard) as if it were typed on the command line.
Useful for launching from a menu or hot-key.
--dict=/path/to/dict: Use the copy of dict in /path/to/dict.
My favorite way to use Word Inspector is to include a menu item on my
WindowMaker desktop that runs:
wordinspect --define --clipboard
, one for
wordinspect --search --clipboard
, and one that just runs
wordinspect
. This lets me hilight a word in Netscape, an xterm, Emacs, or any
other application, and then just click on my desktop menu to look it
up. If I could figure out how to get hotkeys to work, that would be
even cooler . . . :-)
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