Telesm

An offline-first dictionary using WordNet -or- OpenAI

Why Offline?

I'm sick of online dictionaries. Most of them display lots of ads which is distracting, and almost none of them let you save the words to review them in the future and memorzie them, unless, well, you pay for a premium package.

Introducing Telesm

So, here's an offline dictionary that uses WordNet to display the definition and the examples of a word. It saves your searched words in a list so you can check them later in your spare time.

Now Telesm also supports calling OpenAI api to get the definition and examples of the word. See Usage for more details.

Terminology

Telesm is the Persian word for Talisman.

Installation

Using pip:

pip install telesm

Or if you want to have it globally:

pipx install telesm

Usage

Definition of a word

telesm <word>

# Example output:
talisman:
        ‣ a trinket or piece of jewelry usually hung about the neck and thought to be a magical protection against evil or disease

This will save the word to the database by default, if you don't want to save the word pass --no-save argument.

telesm <word> --no-save

List all words

telesm --list

If you want to navigate over the words one by one, pass --navigate argument:

telesm --list --navigate

Random word

telesm --random

# Example output:
accruing:
        ‣ grow by addition
Examples:
        ⁃ The interest accrues

Search in saved words

telesm --search tal

# Example output:
talisman:
        ‣ a trinket or piece of jewelry usually hung about the neck and thought to be a magical protection against evil or disease

Deleting a word

telesm --delete <word>

Using AI

To use AI feature you need to specify your OpenAI api key in ~/.telesm.conf file.

1. Create ~/.telesm.conf file, if you haven't already.

2. Acquire your api key from OpenAi Dashboard.

3. Put your api key in the config file:

    OPENAI_API_KEY="<your-api-key>"
   

Now you can use the AI feature:

telesm --ai <word>

You can set AI_FIRST=1 to ~/.telesm.conf file to use AI without the need to pass --ai argument:

telesm <word> # Would use AI now

This will also save the word in the database so you'd have it offline for future uses. Pass --no-save if you don't want to save it.

If you already searched for a word without using AI and saved the word in the database, passing --ai would not have any effects. Try deleting the word by running telesm --delete <word> and try again in case you prefer to have the AI definition instead.