haradict Initial Release (v0.1.0)
December 21, 2022
An Arabic dictionary in your terminal, powered by ElixirFM.
Online Arabic dictionaries are pretty bad. They’re usually blind to morphology. Thankfully, ElixirFM exists, and it’s free software under the GPL license. Univerzita Karlova hosts an ElixirFM web interface you can use here, and I did for some time.
After some time, I didn’t want to remain dependent on a remote university continuing to operate this service. Also, running ElixirFM locally meant my queries would be private and not sent across the internet. So I made haradict, a TUI application that directly imports ElixirFM as a library.
It’s made using brick, a TUI framework for Haskell, which facilitated working in an FRP style. And, naturally, ElixirFM is the other key dependency, which provides a rich model of the Arabic language.
Features
- Lookup functionality: look up a piece of text in Arabic and it will be parsed into matching roots, which will be displayed in the results.
- Paginated results view.
