I installed Alfred yesterday and bought the power pack to be able to use the workflows feature. I started playing with it and found out a piece of functionality that I couldn’t find: a Spanish Thesaurus. For English, I found one quickly. However, for Spanish, I was unable to find any, so I decided to build one myself.
My strategy to accomplish this:
- Find out how to use JS (and NodeJS) inside Alfred.
- Find a service that provides an API for Spanish (surprisingly there is none, or I couldn’t find one).
- As there was no API, I’d have to do some web scrapping. I found an excellent page to do so https://www.sinonimosonline.com/, and I hope I am not transgressing any law by doing so. If so, please let me know…
My pseudo code looks like this:
- Get the {query} to be searched for
- Request the URL with the {query}
- Parse the response
- Get the results in an array
- Send that to Alfred for display.
I found alfy a nice library that facilitates the creation of Alfred workflows with JS. and based my efforts from there. The documentation is straightforward on how to use it. Before alfy I used axios to make the request but moved back to alfy to reduce dependency.
The final product looks like this:
Is very simple to use. You call Alfred and then type sps (Spanish Synonym). Then you write the word you are looking for, and a series of synonyms appear. You can enter in any of them, and it will take you to the sinonimosenlinea.com page. You can type shift to see a previous as well.
The code is here: https://github.com/sindresorhus/alfy)
The packal site here: http://www.packal.org/workflow/spanish-synonyms
My first open source contribution for a while. Hope someone finds it useful.
