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

[CupofDice]

Using opensuse 11.2 KDE 64bit, I have this problem when running Artha in the terminal. I installed first by tracking down a fedora RPM, but that gave me an error and Artha wouldn't search, so then I installed by source code. I have libwordnet-devel installed, which I think is wordnet-dev on ubuntu, but I also installed the wordnet package from the princeton site to see if that would work.

Either way ,I keep getting this error when running Artha in the terminal and my searches turn up empty.

Failed to open WordNet database files!
Make sure WordNet's database files are present at

(null).

If present elsewhere, set the environment variable WNHOME to point to it.

Thanks for any help.

[legends2k]

@CupofDice: I installed OpenSUSE 11.2 (with KDE 4.3) fresh in a virtual machine and tried searching for packages 'wordnet', 'wordnet-devel', 'libwordnet-devel' using the command

zypper install wordnet wordnet-devel libwordnet-devel

and all of them returned a "'package' not found" message. It is to be noted that the WordNet package is not yet available in the OpenSUSE official repositories. It's currently in their wishlist only (http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Various); so wordnet cannot be installed from OpenSUSE's repositories with a single command; one has to install it from source.

So I downloaded WordNet's tarball from Princeton's site (http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/3.0...et-3.0.tar.bz2) and tried compiling its source; but for building WordNet from source, Tcl and Tk development headers are required (as told by WordNet build system). Hence I installed them by

zypper install tcl-devel tk-devel

. Then I was able to successfully build and install WordNet (tried running command 'wnb' and searched some random terms in the thesaurus for which results got returned properly. Finally, I installed Artha from source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/arth...r.bz2/download). It worked fine the very first time; search returned results normally as it should.

I can see that you've installed Artha from source properly; but I'm skeptical of your WordNet installation. Can you please tell how you installed WordNet in your machine?

[CupofDice]

@CupofDice: I installed OpenSUSE 11.2 (with KDE 4.3) fresh in a virtual machine and tried searching for packages 'wordnet', 'wordnet-devel', 'libwordnet-devel' using the command
and all of them returned a "'package' not found" message. It is to be noted that the WordNet package is not yet available in the OpenSUSE official repositories. It's currently in their wishlist only (http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Various); so wordnet cannot be installed from OpenSUSE's repositories with a single command; one has to install it from source.

So I downloaded WordNet's tarball from Princeton's site (http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/3.0...et-3.0.tar.bz2) and tried compiling its source; but for building WordNet from source, Tcl and Tk development headers are required (as told by WordNet build system). Hence I installed them by . Then I was able to successfully build and install WordNet (tried running command 'wnb' and searched some random terms in the thesaurus for which results got returned properly. Finally, I installed Artha from source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/arth...r.bz2/download). It worked fine the very first time; search returned results normally as it should.

I can see that you've installed Artha from source properly; but I'm skeptical of your WordNet installation. Can you please tell how you installed WordNet in your machine?

Thanks legends2k. I followed your instructions, but they didn't work, but 'cnf wnb' told me that there was now a 'wordnet' package. Also, I have some repositories (like packman) which is where I think I got the other wordnet packages from. Not really sure though.

Opensuse handles repositories differently than Ubuntu and confuses me a bit.

But it is now working. Thanks again for the great app!

[gvlists]

This is exactly the tool I was looking for as I am out of internet when I am travelling. Gnome-dictionary is almost not usable for me then. May be it is a wordweb hangover. The shortcut and notification feature of artha fits my requirement better. Thanks again.

[go_beep_yourself]

Can Artha do Language to Other Language definitions and vise versa? That would be nice!

[legends2k]

@gvlists: Am glad it helps

@go_beep_yourself: No, it doesn't. Artha's primary goal is to be a very light thesaurus. I'm planning to make Artha work with more than one WordNet i.e. it works with the English WordNet now, but I want it to work with other language WordNets too; in fact, right now, any WordNet that follows English WordNet's format should work with Artha fine ~ so only integrations is something I'm trying to work on, but translations ~ nope. It would make it heavy.

[theoryl]

Thanks Legends2k for your awesome work! I really enjoy using your great app. I have one suggestion, which is to have a "history" that remembers the past queries. It will be useful for an English learner to remind himself of the unfamiliar words.

Thanks again!

[legends2k]

Thanks for the compliments theoryl. Even I've been wanting to do Persistent History for some time now, but pushed it to the back of the ToDo list in favour of other ones, but now it's moved from the ToDo list to User's Wishlist; so yes, in version next to the coming one you'll have it

Attached is a sneak peek of the next release (M$ Windows version is imminent)!

[theoryl]

Thank you in advance, I'll look forward to it! Although of course I'm already a happy Artha user without the "history" feature. =)

[kltpzyxm]

Wow! Just wow! I never thought I'd come close to liking any app as much as WordWeb, but now, I can't stand to use WordWeb on Windows. Take a bow, legends2k. This is just an incredible program.

A couple of things:

1. I know you've included a hotkey editor, but I just can't seem to find it. The wiki says "press the hotkey button on the toolbar", but i don't see any hotkey button on the program's toolbar. I'm new to linux, so could anyone please give me a dummy's pointer to it? I'm using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

2. A feature request, if you're taking them: In WordWeb, I had gotten used to just clicking on a word (not highlighting it, just clicking on it) and hitting the hotkey to bring up the definition. Could the same functionality be brought to Artha?

Also, i'm with Mehr_o for the feature request to make the hotkey into a switch instead of the current "hotkey to bring it up, Esc to shut down" option.