Announcing Artha ~ An off-line English thesaurus with hot key look up & notifications

[legends2k]

New version 1.0.2 released for both Windows and Linux!


Hi,

I would like to announce Artha - A handy off-line English thesaurus based on WordNet. Artha has unique features like hot key look up, passive desktop notifications, regular expression based search, spelling suggestions, etc.

When executed, Artha sits on the system tray monitoring for a set hot key combination. When the user selects some text on any window and presses this hot key, Artha pops up with the definitions of the selection. Should the user prefer notifications over pop-ups, he/she can enable notifications, where instead of popping-up, is shows passive notification of the selected text's most important definition alone. With the 0.9.1 release, Artha also has regex based search for finding words that are vaguely known. Wildcard (*), Joker (?), Range ([, ]), etc. can be used in the regex search pattern to zero-in the sought word.

Apart from showing the definitions of a word, it also shows its relatives like Synonyms, Antonyms, Derivatives, Attributes, Pertainyms, Similar term and 6 more detailed trees. It can also show domain terms i.e. if 'photography' is searched for, in the 'Domain' tab results, it lists jargon words used in the photography domain like contrast, blow-up, solarise, retouch, intensify, sensitise, etc.

Artha has two modes: simple and detailed. While the former is for a casual user, latter is for people who need more detailed analysis of a given word. In detailed mode, for a given word, Artha displays trees of information like 'Type of', 'Types', 'Part of', 'Parts', etc. (e.g. see screenshot 1, for 'water' is kind of... tree)

For many recently-migrated-from-Windows users, WordWeb (proprietary) would have been a very handy tool there and they ask for a clone/replacement of WordWeb in Linux. Well, Artha could be used as an advanced replacement for WordWeb in *nix environments by not a clone, as it has a wider feature list than WordWeb.

Artha comes in .deb fromat, for easy installation in Ubuntu. Simply double click the .deb or type in the following command. Please do not use dpkg, as it doesn't have the ability to resolve dependencies automatically.

$ sudo gdebi artha_1.0.2-1_amd64.deb

Download for i386 - artha_1.0.2-1_i386.deb
Download for amd64 - artha_1.0.2-1_amd64.deb

Homepage: http://artha.sourceforge.net/

P.S.: This is my first open-source application

[sharathpaps]

@Sundaram,
Artha is a wonderful name for this really really nice app. I liked the interface, its clean and very usable. Everything is working flawlessly. Congratulations. Looking forward to this one reaching the repos soon.

[Tekmoor]

I agree, very clean and usable. It works good, I'm really liking it so far. I wanted something like this, great job!

[anechoic]

a nice tool for a writer/word nerd! nice job!

[Faolan84]

SWEET! This is something that should be included on the Jaunty disc. It's something that's simple, elegant, and very useful. Having a dictionary feature here would make it rock twice as much.

[pt123]

impressive

[Chokkan]

This looks awesome. Great job.

[kostkon]

Great work, really great.

Ah, and you can use a PPA if you want to more easily distribute it (for Ubuntu users, that is).

[Nevon]

Great! As for feature requests, I think you should be able to configure the hotkey for calling Artha. Also, a more long term goal should be to include other languages besides English.

[GrouchoMarx]

I was just thinking the other day how nice it would be to have a decent off-line thesaurus. Looks great. However the excessive tool-tips are annoying and get in the way when scanning text.