cross-posted from: https://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.

  • @[email protected]
    16•1 year ago

    So it’s basically https://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.

    • christosOP
      5•1 year ago

      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.

    • christosOP
      11•1 year ago

      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.

  • @pensivepangolinEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    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.

      • @pensivepangolinEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        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.

    • christosOP
      0•1 year ago

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

      • @cbarrickEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        For Arch based systems, the command is:

        # pacman -S words

        On Debian based systems, I think the command is:

        # apt install wordlist

        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.

        • christosOP
          2•1 year ago

          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.

          • @pensivepangolinEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            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 :)

            • christosOP
              3•1 year ago

              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.

            • christosOP
              1•1 year ago

              I already updated the README, mentioning the dependency.

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

  • christosOP
    2•1 year ago

    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.

  • christosOP
    1•1 year ago

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

    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