Use Emacs to read English classic books efficiently

  |   Source

Classic books is difficult to read because they have many new words.

Find the word's dictionary definition is tedios and breaks the flow.

I tried reading those books in iPad and Kindle. The experience is not very smooth because,

  • It takes too much effort to select the word and send it to the dictionary. Particularly difficulty for me because I've got big fingers
  • The dictionary popup overlaps with the book's content. Feels not comfortable

In Emacs,

  • new words can be automatically highlighted
  • The book's content and dictionary are displayed side by side

The Emacs plugin mybigword 0.2.4 provides a new command mybigword-big-words-in-current-windows which automatically highlight the new words in current window with hint. Type the hint, the word's definition is displayed in another window.

Screenshot before running M-x mybigword-big-words-in-current-windows,

mybigword-before.png

After,

mybigword-after.png

The hint UI is actually based on avy.

Every English word can be measure by word frequency named Zipf Scale (see http://crr.ugent.be/papers/van_Heuven_et_al_SUBTLEX-UK.pdf for more details).

Any word with ZipF less than the value of mybigword-upper-limit is regarded as new word.

In my setup, mybigword-upper-limit is 3.6.

Comments powered by Disqus