tdv(1)

Name

tdv - Translation dictionary viewer

Synopsis

tdv [OPTION]… [DICTIONARY.ifo]…

Description

tdv is a StarDict dictionary viewer, custom-tailored for translation dictionaries, with a simple curses-based terminal UI, and a GTK+ graphical UI.

Without any command line arguments, the program expects to find a list of dictionaries to load on start-up in its configuration file. The .ifo files contain information required to load dictionaries from their accompanying database files.

Options

--gui: Launch the GUI even when run from a terminal.
-h, --help: Display a help message and exit.
-V, --version: Output version information and exit.

Configuration

You can start your tdv.conf file with the following snippet:

[Settings]
center-search = true     # Ensure visibility of preceding entries?
underline-last = false   # Underline the last line of entries?
hl-common-prefix = true  # Highlight the longest common prefix?
watch-selection = true   # Watch X11 selection for changes?

The watch-selection option makes the application watch the X11 PRIMARY selection for changes and automatically search for any selected text. This feature requires XCB. Wayland is currently unsupported, but would require a compositor supporting the wlr-data-control protocol. Luckily, some compositors, such as Sway, synchronize selections with Xwayland.

To set up automatically loaded dictionaries, use the following scheme:

[Dictionaries]
name 1 = ~/path/to/dict.ifo
name 2 = ~/another/dict.ifo

The left-hand side keys define their appearance in the tab bar.

Finally, to make the program look nicer in 256color black-on-white terminals, rather than rely on the universal default, try:

[Colors]
header = reverse
header-active = ul
search = ul
even = 16 231
odd = 16 255

Terminal attributes are accepted in a format similar to that of git-config(1), only named colours aren’t supported.

Extensions

Because the StarDict file format is a bit of a clusterfuck with regard to collation of dictionary entries, this software introduces an additional, optional "collation" field into the .ifo file. When tdv discovers this field while reading a dictionary, it automatically reorders the index according to that locale (e.g., "cs_CZ"). This operation may take a little while, in the order of seconds.

Files

tdv follows the XDG Base Directory Specification.

~/.config/tdv/tdv.conf: The configuration file.

Reporting bugs

Use https://git.janouch.name/p/tdv to report bugs, request features, or submit pull requests.