I’ve just released two clients for the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE 5th ed.): a fork of Qt-based desktop client and a terminal client written in Rust.

ldoce5viewer

My updated fork of the original LDOCE viewer. I kept the original project as a base and applied fixes and improvements so it works well on modern systems. Notable changes are:

  • Migration from Qt4 to Qt5

  • Automatic Dark Mode Support

  • Complete Python 3 Migration

ldoce5viewer screenshot

ldoce5viewer-tui

A Rust rewrite of the original Python TUI implementation. It brings a snappy, keyboard-driven experience to the terminal while keeping the same familiar workflow. The rewrite focuses on performance, responsiveness, and portability; if you prefer working inside the terminal, the Rust client is lightweight and fast while preserving the features people liked in the original Python version.

ldoce5viewer-tui screenshot
Notable features:

  • Terminal-first, keyboard-driven UI with low latency and small memory footprint

  • Vim-style navigation, browser-like history, find-in-page and Zen mode

  • Tantivy-powered full-text search with advanced filters overlay

  • Live incremental (prefix) search while you type

  • Audio playback support from the terminal

  • In-terminal picture rendering on Kitty/iTerm2, Unicode block fallback elsewhere

  • Single-binary builds via Cargo and cross-platform support

Both projects are available on GitHub:

Check the repositories for releases, installation instructions, and pre-built binaries.

Happy hacking!