DICTL(1)

💖 DICTL — bestie's guide to the lil charset-remix wrapper 💖

okay so picture this: your terminal is stuck in the past and does NOT speak utf-8, but the dictionary you're trying to read is fully utf-8 encoded. dictl is the girl in the middle who translates for both of them. it's a wrapper script for dict that lets you use utf-8 encoded dictionaries on a terminal that is not utf-8 aware. no cap.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

dictl [OPTIONS] [word]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea: dictl calls dict with the arguments you gave it on the command line. that's it, that's the whole job. 🫶

it figures out your preferred character set by reading the environment variable DICTL_CHARSET. and if that variable is empty? no worries bestie, dictl just runs the locale command and sniffs out the character set from its output. main character detective energy. 🔍

then everything you pass to dictl — including word — gets converted from your preferred character set into the server's character set, which is whatever DICTL_SERVER_CHARSET says (and if that one's unset, it defaults to utf-8). then all of it goes to dict. and when dict talks back, its output gets converted right back into your preferred character set. a whole round trip, a whole glow-up. 💅

NOTE: okay listen, this part matters. because iconv straight up omits characters from the output when they're invalid, recode -f is what gets used for character set conversions by default. if you're an iconv girlie and you want that instead, just set DICTL_USE_ICONV to a non-empty string. and if konwert is more your vibe, set DICTL_USE_KONWERT to a non-empty string. pick your fighter. 🔥

and one more thing, because I love you: recode, iconv and konwert do not support conversion to or from the "C" or "POSIX" locales. so if your locale is "C" or "POSIX", it's recommended that you set DICTL_CHARSET to "latin1" (ISO_8859-1). do it. it's giving self-care. 🎀

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• dictl accepts all dict options as described in dict(1).

like, all of them. every single one. she's not gatekeeping, she's just passing them straight through to dict. iykyk. ✨

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

dictl was written by Aleksey Cheusov <vle@gmx.net>.

This manual page was written by Robert D. Hilliard <hilliard@debian.org> and Aleksey Cheusov <vle@gmx.net>.

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• dict(1)
• recode(1)
• iconv(1)
• konwert(1)

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and that's the whole page bestie, mwah 💋 this lil slice of the General Commands Manual is DICTL(1) — that's the section 1 manual name right there. go forth and read your utf-8 dictionaries on your crusty non-utf-8 terminal. slay. 🌈💜