Instant view

[The waiter]

Is in the GD possible to set up instant view like in Stardict? I mean, when I am typing in Stardict, it automatically shows list of particular words with instant translation on the right side. Is this possible in GD as well?

[Tvangeste]

Hi, this is not currently possible. And I'm not sure it is a really good way of doing things.

GoldenDict supports not only local dictionaries, but also online ones, plus all kinds of custom things (like invoking external commands, i.e., man). Bombarding external services with lots of requests when you type could be quite problematic and might be considered by those services as denial-of-service attacks.

But even if you have only the local dictionaries, if they are any big you'll get the performance hit if this feature is implemented. So, instead of quickly finding the headwords you're typing GoldenDict would be busy fetching and rendering things that are of little value.

Currently, if you'd like to show the articles for the closest word to what's you've typed, just press Down arrow, no need to enter the word in full.

[The waiter]

Thx for answer

[Tvangeste]

Thx for answer

I experimented with your suggestion earlier today, implementing "instant translation", just a hackish version to get a feeling how well it would work in real use.

After playing with it, I'm not sure it brings much to the table. Even if you disable all non-local dictionaries, the overall experience is not that good. The main view always flashes with new information when you type, and in order to verify whether I reached to the right word or not I need to move my eyes from the translation line to the main view, find the headword, figure out is it the one I need or not (and during that mental work I cannot type, naturally )

At the end, A LOT more work for the computer, a lot more work for my brain and much slower search of the word I wanted to translate.

Compare to the current approach: you just type whatever you wish, and as soon as the first line in the drop down list (which is *right* before the translation line, so there is not much of an eye movement to get there) matches what you need, just click Down. The second approach beats the instant translation hands down. And it's "environment friendly", and can be safely used with online dictionaries.

[The waiter]

Forget it...
I only wanted to have one goal. When I am under main window and typing a keyword, afterwards I have to press Enter key or down arrow to show the result. I just wanted to avoid this. In the StarDict you don`t need to. During your typing, the pre-result is immediately shown on the right until the whole word so I just consider it to be more comfortable. But as you explained me, now I understand the problem about online dictionaries...