Spelling and Dictionary Lookups at Bash Command Line

If you've ever wanted an easy way to look up a word in the dictionary, or spell check a word at the command line (in Linux), I've come up with a simple way to do it.

First, make sure you have aspell and curl installed, then simply paste the following functions into your .bashrc file:

function dictlookup
{

curl dict://dict.org/d:$1

}

function spellcheck
{
echo "$1" | aspell -a -c | grep "&"
}

Now you can do things like this:

> spellcheck antecedant

and:

> dictlookup antecedent

Enjoy!

Bash Tab Completion

For all you Linux users out there, I just discovered something wonderfully useful at the Bash command line: tab completion suggestions. See this pic to get a better idea what I'm talking about:


For the above example, I typed "to", then hit the "tab" key. As expected, my computer beeped, indicating "hey, dummy there are a bunch of matches, how am I supposed to figure out which one you want?". To get a list of the possible matches, hit the "tab" key again. Then it prints out all of the available choices. Why hadn't I discovered this sooner?

Oh, and if you think my custom cursor is nifty, here's the line of code to put in your ~/.bashrc file:

PS1='\n================================\n\[\033[01;32m\]\h\[\033[00m\]:\n \[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\n > '

I like having a nice separation between command outputs. It also gives me a double-clickable path (for quick copying), I never have to type "pwd" to remind myself where I am, and can quickly see which machine I'm logged into. Uber handy.