I wrote a dictionary application

[ilius]

After working with dictionaries for 15 years, I finally made my own dictionary application:

https://codeberg.org/ilius/ayandict
https://github.com/ilius/ayandict

A simple and minimalistic cross-platform desktop dictionary application based on Qt framework and written in Go that uses StarDict dictionary format.

Binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac are uploaded.

If you can make it work on Android, please let me know. (I do not have Android Studio)

[saturn99]

😍🤩

[glowinthedark]

Followed the steps on the project page got me to panic: runtime error: integer divide by zero.

First did go install github.com/ilius/ayandict/v2@latest which successfully built the binary, but when running it throws an error about missing qtbox.

Next, cloned the repo, did go build and then ran ./ayandict but got the same panic: runtime error: integer divide by zero thrown by missing qtbox.

looking for qtbox in: /Users/12345/projects/ayandict/qtbox
final qtbox location: /Users/12345/projects/ayandict/qtbox
panic: runtime error: integer divide by zero

goroutine 1 [running, locked to thread]:
github.com/ilius/qt/internal.InitProcess.func2(0x14000035ad8?)
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/qt@v0.0.0-20230422004322-c855bcf0151b/internal/internal.go:334 +0x9c
github.com/ilius/qt/internal.InitProcess.func1({0x1070d1ba8?, 0x140000aa2d0?}, {0x1300a5518?, 0x14000274000?}, 0x14000035d18)
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/qt@v0.0.0-20230422004322-c855bcf0151b/internal/internal.go:309 +0x104
github.com/ilius/qt/internal.InitProcess()
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/qt@v0.0.0-20230422004322-c855bcf0151b/internal/internal.go:333 +0x820
github.com/ilius/qt/widgets.NewQApplication(0x1087c5be0?, {0x1063ac303?, 0x13?, 0x1?})
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/qt@v0.0.0-20230422004322-c855bcf0151b/widgets/widgets.go:4921 +0x28
github.com/ilius/ayandict/v2/pkg/application.Run()
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/ayandict/v2@v2.1.0/pkg/application/app.go:76 +0x38
main.main()
	/Users/12345/projects/go/pkg/mod/github.com/ilius/ayandict/v2@v2.1.0/main_gui.go:54 +0x10c

next, running with -h showed there is a -create-config --no-gui cli options so tried those, expecting a config file to be created in the current folder but don't see one and the console log does not show any message or hint about a config file being created anywhere. Looks like --no-gui makes the app spawn a web server on port 8357, but opening http://localhost:8357 just shows a 404 error in the browser — ie the server is up but there is nothing served at / and there is nothing in the console log that would give a hint as to what is going on, and what is the actual endpoint. In any case / should probably redirect to wherever it needs to in case custom endpoints are used, no?

After adding a stardict file in ~/.stardict/dic and running with --no-gui I can see that it has been detected, but no clue and no console messages as to how to actually access the web ui.

ayandict -create-config --no-gui
2025-01-13 17:29:22 INFO Initializing "DLE_v23.8_RealAcademia2025.ifo"
2025-01-13 17:29:22 INFO Starting to load indexes
2025-01-13 17:29:22 INFO Loaded index "/Users/12345/.stardict/dic/DLE_v23.8_RealAcademia2025.idx"
2025-01-13 17:29:22 INFO i_dicts.go:143 Loaded dictionaries dt=27.471542ms
2025-01-13 17:29:22 INFO server.go:256 Starting local server port=8357

It's the second time I'm trying to run ayandict, several months ago when attempting to do the same for the first time thought that the app was still in development, not ready yet for end users, and I remember thinking that I need to wait some more time, and then give it another go once it's ready, but as it is now the experience is pretty rough — the error messages are cryptic and don't provide hints as to how to fix them, there is no default config file, or at least I don't see any details in the console about which configs are used during the startup. I do admit though that maybe I am just not able to follow correctly the steps and struggle to understand what needs to be done.

To me it looks the like app is probably already working fine, the only things that might be missing are better steps to set it up, and maybe better and more helpful error messages in the console about what's going going on, which config files are being used, which dictionaries are found, and what the user needs to do in order to get it up and running.

In an ideal scenario I was expecting something like default config created at ~/.config/appfolder/config.cfg and ie using dictionary path: ~/some/path customize by setting blabla=customdir in the config file.

And if dependencies cannot be resolved, such as qtbox then show something more useful than panic: runtime error: integer divide by zero which gives the impression that it's either not yet complete or that the project is more of a personal experiment and not meant to be used by newb users.

[ilius]

For some reason I suddenly can't push to github!

[ilius]

I pushed to codeberg just in case!
https://codeberg.org/ilius/ayandict

[ilius]

Pushing to Github worked (fixed by itself, a problem on Github side I guess).

[ilius]

You seem to be using Mac.
Please download the binary from latest release and try.
https://github.com/ilius/ayandict/releases/tag/v2.1.0

[glowinthedark]

with the latest release binary (v2.1.0) exactly the same error happens — panic: runtime error: integer divide by zero because of qtbox missing; same with master after doing a git pull; if the app is supposed to download qtbox when missing for some reason that didn't seem to work on mac arm64;

I did manage to find a matching qtbox binary and manually put it in the same folder as the executable, and then the desktop GUI started, but only after changing the config to web_enable = false — apparently enabling the web mode prevents the GUI from showing up even if it's not started with -no-gui — a bit confusing, but maybe it's just me not being able to grasp how it's supposed to work.

Now the GUI is finally up and running! 🚀 I suppose it might be a limitation of the stardict format but css/js does not get picked up — used this mdx dictionary, converted to stardict using pyglossary, and the resources are there in the res subfolder. Moving them manually from the res folder one level up where the .ifo file is located didn't change anything.

The default UI styling for the webview content seems to ignore the system dark/light mode, and links display in the same color in both dark mode and light:

Btw, the ayandict project page says only stardict is supported, yet there is the output option in pyglossary for AyanDict SQLite — is it supported too? Should the sqlite files have a specific extension in order to be detected? Or is is planned for the future versions? sqlite is imo a perfect format, and moreover would allow using tons of other ways to query the data.

Btw, in recent versions of sqlite3 it's possible to do case-insensitive queries and indexing, which is awesome because you can create a table with COLLATE NOCASE so that searching with WHERE term like... are case-insensitive.

CREATE TABLE mydict (term TEXT COLLATE NOCASE, defi TEXT COLLATE NOCASE)

also index with NOCASE

CREATE INDEX ix_term ON mydict (term COLLATE NOCASE)

also sqlite has an extensions API, so in theory any missing features like morphology etc can be implemented as extensions, and be decoupled from a specific dictionary frontend.