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well1912 | 3 years ago

Anecdote from this morning: I was taking notes on a technical book in a field I have only a little experience with, and came across a lot of words that I wanted the definition of. At first I opened wiktionary in my browser, but then I thought it'd be nice to have everything in Emacs, after which I used `M-x eww`, `!wikt <term>`. Then on a whim I tried `M-x dictionary`, and lo and behold Emacs has a built in dictionary, which you can even install new dictionaries in and search across. The default dictionary wasn't perfect, with a few terms not existing, but it's hard to beat the convenience for the 95% case. As a bonus, it defaults to searching the word under your cursor.

The point here is less "hey, Emacs has a dictionary!" (I'm sure many/most editors do!), more "hey, Emacs has a lot of use cases built in and they're easily discoverable." It's a great platform with a lot of care put into it over the years by different people, and if you come to it with the perspective of "it's just an editor" you'll be missing out.

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