🚀 go-pugleaf

David Baker <davidbaker@arenamag.co.uk> wrote:

> Anyone know of a Mac utility which I can use to search an ASCII
> dictionary (about 170,000) words. Right now I am using the Find
> function in Word, but there's probably a better way (except tat I am not
> a programmer).

It depends on exactly what you want to do.  There's QuickSearch which is
excellent for searching multiple files; incremental search[1] in Alpha
(stolen from Emacs) which is excellent for finding a single word in a
file; or the Excalibur spelling checker which will swallow a text file
dictionary so you can use it as a spelling checker reference.

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~excalibr/excalibur.html
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~keleher/alpha.html

and ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/systems/mac/(umich)|(info-mac)
for QuickSearch.

Rowland.

[1]

i-search works like this: type ctrl-s then the first letter of the word
you're looking for.  You move to the first match of this letter; then
type the second letter, and you move to the first match of this
two-letter combination; type the third letter, and you move to the first
match of that three-letter combination, and so on.  Very fast, very
convenient, and no mucking around with dialogue boxes.  ctrl-g when
you've found what you're looking for gets you out of it (along with
other mysterious key combinations).  It's very Emacs-like rather than
Mac-like because Alpha stole the whole lot from Emacs.

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