u/yikesx10000

Yesterday I asked an LLM for help writing a minor mode that would cater to my very particular workflow when reading large amounts of PDF documents and taking notes on them. I intended it to be largely an educational experience in Elisp, and it was, but what I ended up with was so useful (and fancy!) that I wanted to share it in case anyone else could use some of the functions or ideas in their own setup.

Basically, the mode builds the split-screen setup and provides functions that allow me to navigate within the PDF file and between files without moving point from the Org buffer containing my notes. Opening a PDF file using these commands automatically moves point to the Org headline for that document or, if a headline doesn't exist for that document, appends one to the bottom of the Org file and moves point there. I can also open a document in the viewer from its corresponding Org headline.

I don't think it's suitable for distribution as a package -- vibe-coded, too me-specific, any number of other reasons -- but I made a Github repo; the README has all the details, and the prompt I used.

I was careful during the session with the LLM to slow down and make sure I understood everything it was doing, asking questions and making suggestions. But while it was really educational, I don't know what I don't know, so it's likely there are places where there are other, better ways of achieving the same result. I'd love to hear about these; if anyone's interested enough to take the time to read the code (and the copious comments!), any feedback would be very welcome.

I posted this at the quick-sdcv Github page, but, on the off chance it might help someone else achieve this dream scenario for a very particular kind of nerd (who might not be aware of the package), wanted to cross-post here. So this is how I set up quick-sdcv to get instant offline access to the Oxford English Dictionary from any buffer in Emacs (but especially epub buffers).

(The OED, if you don't know, is a legendary, massive "historical dictionary" which focuses on providing information about the shifting usage of English words over time, with extensive quotations. It's a fascinating monster; read more here.)

First I installed sdcv itself, through apt; very easy. Then I downloaded the two files containing the OED from here -- it's a chunky boi, but so worthwhile. Unzipped them and copied them to ~/.stardict/dic/ (/usr/share/stardict/dict also works). This is all you have to do to make the OED available from the command line.

To wire it up to Emacs, I put the following block in my init.el:

(use-package quick-sdcv
  :bind  
  ("s-d" . my-quick-sdcv-dwim)
  (:map quick-sdcv-mode-map
        ("q" . quit-window)        
        ("<tab>" . outline-toggle-children))    
  :hook    
  (quick-sdcv-mode . goto-address-mode)    
  :config    
  (add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist    
               '("\\*sdcv"    
                 (display-buffer-reuse-window display-buffer-at-bottom)    
                 (window-height . 0.3)))    
  :custom    
  (quick-sdcv-dictionary-prefix-symbol "▶")    
  (quick-sdcv-ellipsis " ▼")    
  (quick-sdcv-unique-buffers t))

There are some modifications here: I wanted the quick-sdcv buffer to behave essentially like a help buffer: open a window (or reuse one), move my cursor there, and restore my previous window layout when I hit q. And quick-sdcv displays its results in outline-minor-mode with each dictionary's results under its own heading, so I wanted <tab> to quickly close and open results from different dictionaries (I did grab some others, it's pretty irresistible).

my-quick-sdcv-dwim is a very simple function which makes the keybind either search for the word at point or, with C-u, prompt me for a search term:

(defun my-quick-sdcv-dwim (&optional arg)
  "Look up a word using quick-sdcv.
By default, looks up the word at point.
With a prefix argument (\\[universal-argument]), prompts for a word."
  (interactive "P")
  (if arg
      (call-interactively #'quick-sdcv-search-input)
    (quick-sdcv-search-at-point)))

This is already very long! But let me just mention three more small things I tweaked to make the experience complete:

I use nov to read epub books inside Emacs, so to the nov-mode-map I added (with use-package):

:bind
(:map nov-mode-map
...
("K" . quick-sdcv-search-at-point))

...for a slightly more ergonomic experience when I'm deep in some book.

As you might have guessed from the K binding, I use evil, but I want the quick-sdcv window to just be in regular Emacs mode so my q and <TAB> work as expected, so I added this line to my evil config:

(evil-set-initial-state 'quick-sdcv-mode 'emacs)

Finally, the sdcv formatting of output is minimalistic, and the OED in particular is very dense (the printed edition comes with a literal magnifying glass), so I set a hook to display the results in olivetti-mode, just to make things a little bit prettier:

(use-package olivetti
  :hook
  (quick-sdcv-mode . olivetti-mode))

This is way more than I intended to write, but I hope that doesn't give the impression that this package (and its dependency) is in any way complicated or difficult to get up and running; I probably spent less time setting all this up than I did writing this post. And now I have instantaneous access to the freaking OED at the push of a button.

This is why Emacs is so magical for me: those moments when the program and its community come together to help me scratch some very particular itch that would be impossible (for me) to do in quite the same way in any other context. I'm so grateful to the package author, James Cherti, and I hope this helps some other word nerds out there!