Dictionary Applet/8

I’ve finally been able to begin working on the new GNOME Dictionary widgets. While GdictEntry still has issues – related to the speed of word look up and the entry completion – and has already hit CVS, in the last two days I’ve been hacking on the definition display widget, or GdictDefbox (I’ve retained the name from the old code).

The new Defbox code is a little bit more simple – things like links are not implemented (yet, even though I found them questionable), and the output is not quite as good looking as the old one; here’s the obligatory screenshot:

Aside from code cleanliness and the new multiple back-end system, what differences there are with the old Defbox? First of all, this is a composite widget and not just a TextView-derived widget; this allows neat things like the next feature, that is the embedded search pane:

It should Just Work®: Ctrl+F to view it, Ctrl+G for the next match, Esc to close it. Say goodbye to silly find dialogs.

The new GdictDefbox also allows jumping from one definition to another, by tracking them internally.

With GdictDefbox nailed down, a simple Dictionary application and applet might already be created; I plan to improve the definition box’s output and put it on par with the current one (plus enabling theming of the colors/sizes using GtkStyle) before actually coding the new Dictionary – but keep checking out the new-dictionary branch of gnome-utils in the next week or so.

Update 20051129@13:49: the spiffy new GdictDefbox is CVS as of some minutes. Go and try it using the gnome-dictionary/libgdict/test-defbox.c test case.

[gnome]
[hacking]
[development]