Yomichad

Yomichad is a Japanese pop-up dictionary that can display readings and English definitions of Japanese words, kanji, and optionally named entities. It is similar to yomichan, 10ten, and rikaikun in spirit, but targets qutebrowser. Yomichad is here to help you master 読み方 like a chad!

demonstration.mp4

Installation

Yomichad must be installed as a qutebrowser userscript. This can be done, for example, by cloning this repository and symlinking the yomichad executable to a directory that qutebrowser scans for scripts (e.g. ~/.local/share/qutebrowser/userscripts). Yomichad relies on the following third-party libraries, so make sure they are installed:

• jamdict, jamdict-data: Required for querying different Japanese language resources.
• PyQt5/PyQt6: Used to create the pop-up dictionary UI. This should already be shipped with qutebrowser and is only listed here for completeness.
• python-xlib (optional; X11 only): When this is installed, yomichad tries to center the pop-up dictionary in the qutebrowser window. This uses low-level X11 hacks, so if you experience bugs, please open an issue. If this is not installed, the popup dictionary is simply centered on the screen.

Note

On Wayland clients cannot position themselves, so the pop-up appears wherever your compositor places it. It requests a fixed size to be floated rather than tiled. To adjust its placement, add a window rule to your compositor matching an app_id of yomichad.

Usage

First, some keybindings should be configured for launching yomichad from qutebrowser. You can, for example, add the following lines to your ~/.config/qutebrowser/config.py:

for mode in ["normal", "caret"]:
    config.bind('gs', 'spawn --userscript yomichad', mode=mode)
    config.bind('gS', 'spawn --userscript yomichad --prefix-search', mode=mode)

Yomichad uses selected text as a query, so make sure to select the phrase you want to look up (e.g. in caret mode or using the mouse) before you run this script! The following flags can be used to customize yomichad to your workflow:

• --no-kanji: Do not lookup individual kanji.
• --names: Enable the lookup of Japanese names.
• --prefix-search: Treat selected text as a prefix and search for words starting with it.