SPELION: A TUI Spelling Bee Puzzle

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/4516333

Spelion is a word spelling puzzle.

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/spelion

Using just the given 7 letters, you are called to form as many words as possible.

Rules

  • The word that you form must include the center letter.
  • You don’t have to use all the other letters.
  • Minimum length of the word that you create is four letters.
  • Any given letters can be used more than one time in a word.
  • The word list is contained in /usr/share/dict/words, minus words with upper-case letters, words with apostrophe and words containing letters with accent marks.

Name

The name SPELION was just a made up word with letters that could form the root spel(l), while at the same time these letters could appear in a (recursive) Spelion puzzle. The name stuck when I found out that by pure chance Spelion was also an anagram of the greek letter epsilon.

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

Update: Another feature has been added to the script, lolcat helps show the Highscores in color, and therefore more fun.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/81fa787e-3ce7-44d3-9b4f-469627a33896.png

The user can configure whether the highscores are shown in color or not.

This is done again by editing the value HISCORE_COLOR (yes / no) in $HOME/.config/spelion/spelion.config

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

A couple of interesting features:

  • The selection of letters is random, so, the number of words - solutions is also random. However the user can configure the range of the number of words - solutions, editing the ~/.config/spelion/spelion.config file. That means that the puzzle can have e.g. between 10 and 30 solutions, or between 50 and 100 etc.
  • The user can avoid the frustration of not ever knowing the right answers when no other solutions come to mind: with the W option the user can browse the list of all possible solutions to the puzzle.

Thank you for your feedback, any other suggestion/correction/input is most welcome.

pensivepangolin,

Quick pointer you may wanna add to the readme:

This depends upon /use/share/dict/words which doesn’t necessarily exist on all systems. To try this out on an arch-based district, (Manjaro,) I had to install the package “words” with yay.

name_NULL111653,

Arch problems…

pensivepangolin,

I’ll have you know that fixing things that don’t work for no reason is my favorite thing to do on a distro /s

While I kid, I have been on Manjaro for 5 years as a daily driver. I know it’s team gets a lot of hate, but it’s been rock solid for me for all my normal usage.

offspec,

Was wondering why this didn’t work, thanks!

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks for this, I had no idea. I will add this to README. Which command did you use?

cbarrick,

For Arch based systems, the command is:


<span style="color:#323232;"># pacman -S words
</span>

On Debian based systems, I think the command is:


<span style="color:#323232;"># apt install wordlist
</span>

The wordlist package is a virtual package. I think it will prompt the user which concrete package (i.e. language) they want to install.

I’m not sitting at a machine to test these commands out.

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you for this response. I will mention /use/share/dict/words as a dependency for this script in the README. However, as I am not an Arch user, and thus not familiar with aur and respective commands, and as installing this dependency would be beyond the scope of this project, I will ommit giving precise instructions on how to install this package.

pensivepangolin,

I think that’s a perfectly reasonable stance. Just mention the need to install the “words” package if it it throws an error saying /use/share/dict/words can’t be found. It took me about three minutes to solve and I’m only a hobbyist!

By the way, love this project! I forgot to say that in my initial reply :)

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

I already updated the README, mentioning the dependency.

Thank you very much for the feedback and the kind words!

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

UPDATE:

The word list now is configurable.

By editing the WORD_LIST line in $HOME/.config/spelion/spelion.config, the user can play the game using another word list.

Parmesan5581,

Beginner is spelled wrong

christos, (edited )
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

Thanx for pointing out, it is now fixed in the repo and in the script, however I cannot update the preview image here on Lemmy… so this spelling error will stick out like a sore thumb.

Update: Fixed.

Bilbo,

I assumed it was intentional.

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

Hey nobody’s prefect.

Stillhart,

So it’s basically www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee but without the hand-curated answer list?

I get kind of annoyed by what words they decide to add or leave out on a given day. I feel like the hand curated aspect makes it feel like major BS when you think of a good word that isn’t valid and then you see “woot” and “psht” or shit in other languages as valid words.

christos,
@christos@lemmy.world avatar

This is very annoying, especially in wordle.

For this I chose the word list as is contained in /usr/share/dict/words, minus words with upper-case letters, words with apostrophe and words containing letters with accent marks. One minor thing I have to do is “grep” rid of latin numerals that pop up, like xxxvi,xxiv etc.

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