reiboul posted on Sep 4 2006 at 11:45 AM said:
Do you plan developping this software? In its current state, it seems quite good (I played with it a little)
Maybe you can add support for multiple dictionaries (using the one I linked is a first step, it is a 3,5mo text file

) and support accents, but I haven't seen much to improve... performance seemed quite good for me, as it has to scan a 30 000+ words file B)
2XWord is actually a front end for xgrep, which is a command line utility that began life about 20 years ago as a spell checker with a curses style interface on a PRIME computer. A few years later, when I had moved to a Unix machine (with a built in spell checker), I changed it to a command line utility. Since then I've ported it to just about every computer I've owned.
I haven't actually changed xgrep in a long while (I think the last change was K&R C to ANSI C). The code is pretty well optimised (it had to be for the computers I was running it on), this includes having the words stored in 26 linked lists (one for each initial letter), which is why accents cause some complications.
At the moment, 2XWord just forks and runs xgrep, piping the output back to the parent process. This means the dictionary is loaded every time you do a search. At some point I would like to move the functions from xgrep into a separate library, accessed from 2XWord. While doing this I could look at accents.
There are functions in xgrep not yet available in 2XWord e.g. you can assign scores to words so you can find the best anagrams more easily. I was intending to implement this first.
Other things I would like to do (in no particularorder) are:
1) Convert the fonts to TrueType
2) Skinnable interface
3) Dictionary management - add/delete words, score words
2XWord does just about everything I need, which is why I released it now, but I am willing to take comments /requests on board.
I do intend to release the source, so if I don't get round to it, may be someone else will
