Re: Announcing myougiden, a new JMdict-based command-line dictionary

["Leonardo" <leoboiko@*********>]

Thanks much for the encouragement Jeroen!

--- In edict-jmdict@yahoogroups.com, Jeroen Hoek <mail@...> wrote:
> I like sensible defaults. You obviously
> put a lot of thought in the design of the user interface.

Well I did make an effort to be smart about defaults (at the risk of being annoying sometimes--e.g. I turn on color automatically if the output looks like a terminal (like grep --color), but the detection of background color is spotty at best,  so I run the risk of displaying unreadable colors over someone's white background...)

But, to be honest, I'm unsatisfied with the speed.  If no particular kind of query is specified, I try to guess what was meant, and the main mechanism is trying less restrictive searches first and returning the first successful one (first perfect matches, then beginning-of-field, then partial; regexp or not; romaji or not; kanji, reading, or gloss...).   In my experience, it seems to work quite well.  The problem is, if the search _actually_ doesn't match anything, it can take an annoying time to run all sorts of queries; "myougiden myxplt" takes 8.42s in my workstation, and you don't even want to know how badly my old Eeepc 700 performs.

Sometimes I wonder if simply grepping EDICT2 wouldn't be faster than the current complex scheme with sqlite queries, indexes and all.

Anyway, I'm glad you liked it :) If you have any suggestions (including little usability annoyances), please do report them!

> * If anyone wants to install myougiden on Ubuntu 12.04, you will need to
> install python3-setuptools for pip-3.2 first.

I'll add this to the README.  The Debian "python3-pip" package pulls it as a dependency, Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't?

--
Leonardo Boiko
http://namakajiri.net/nikki