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crossword.el MELPA MELPA Stable

  • Download and play crossword puzzles in Emacs.

  • Includes a browser to view puzzles' detailed metadata, including progress of partially played puzzles.

  • Optionally, play against the clock, with the built-in timer.

Dependencies: (all already part of core Emacs)

  • seq - for seq--into-vector
  • tabulated-list - for tabulated-list-mode, etal.
  • hl-line - for hl-line-mode
  • calendar - for calendar-read etal.

Dependencies: (external to Emacs)

The package uses either wget or curl to download packages from the network. These are both long-established standard programs and at least one is probably already installed on your computer.

Installation:

  1. Evaluate or load or install this file.

  2. Optionally, define a global keybinding or defalias for function crossword

         (global-set-key (kbd "foo") 'crossword))
         (defalias 'crossword 'foo)
  1. Depending on your temperament and style, you might also want to set direct keybindings and aliases for functions crossword-download, crossword-display, and crossword-load; however, they're just one menu-selection away from function crossword.

Configuration:

M-x customize-group crossword

Initially, you may want to change the default download path crossword-save-path, but otherwise, try using the mode first without any customization.

There exist four customizations for how POINT advances after you fill-in a square or navigate: crossword-arrow-changes-direction, crossword-wrap-on-entry-or-nav, crossword-tab-to-next-unfilled, crossword-auto-nav-only-within-clue.

If you don't usually play more than one crossword in a sitting, you may want to set crossword-quit-to-browser to NIL to save yourself a keystroke on exit.

There are also several 'faces' defined to allow custom colorization and fontification. Knock yoursel out.

Operation:

M-x crossword presents a menu with three options. Unless you already have local puzzle files, you'll want to connect to the network, and decide what puzzle to download and for what date. Select a download source from the download menu, noting that the label for each download source includes the days of the week on which puzzles are published. Then enter the date of the puzzle you want. Different download sources have different archive retention policies, so you can try downloading 'old' puzzles. The puzzle files are tiny, so the download should be instantaneous for most, but YMMV.

M-x crossword a second time. If you choose to directly load a puzzle, you will be prompted to navigate to it. If you choose the browser, you're in for a small treat, as you'll be presented with a handy-dandy nifty screenshot-suitable metadata browser of all your known puzzle files, courtesy of Emacs' built-in tabulated-list-mode. Entries can be sorted by any column by navigating POINT there and pressing 'S' once or twice. Press <RET> to play the puzzle at point. You can also delete files here ('d').

  • IMPORTANT: The mode supports a single save file for each puzzle. These save files do not over-write the original file, so the partially- or completely- played puzzles appear in the browser alongside the untouched original. Save files can be identified in the browser and on youor compuer disk by their file-name extension puz-emacs. You can at any time start a puzzle over from scratch by selecting the untouched copy. BUT... If you don't want to lose your partially played session, you will need to back-up the save file.

Play occurs in a single window of single dedicated frame, although that frame is divided into three dedicated windows, each displaying its own dedicated buffer. You should never need to leave the playable 'Crossword grid' buffer.

At any time, you can save your current state-of-play or restore your saved stated. Quitting a game will prompt you to save or discard it:

               M-q           crossword-quit
               C-x C-s       crossword-backup
               C-c C-x C-f   crossword-restore

If, while playing, you delete the crossword frame or one of its windows, you can use command M-x crossword-recover-game-in-progress. If you kill a clue buffer, you'll need to save, quit, and restore the saved game.

General navigation within the grid buffer should be intuitive, using all the usual keys. Additionally, filling in a square will advance POINT to the next sensible one. Grids begin with an 'across' navigation for solving across clues, but that's easily changed:

               M-a           crossword-nav-dir-across
               M-d           crossword-nav-dir-down
               M-<SPC>       crossword-nav-dir-toggle

Notice that when you change direction, the font of the current clue changes accordingly, within the grid, and for the clues' text below the grid and in their dedicated buffers.

Additionally, you can always navigate directly to any specific clue by its number, using the '/' key:

               /             crossword-goto-clue

You can enter pretty much any character I can think of into any square, but any non-alphabetic characters of the puzzle's language will be ignored (ie. you can make signs for yourself). All lower case alphabetic characters are immediately converted to uppercase.

At some point, you'll want to check your work. You have three options for this:

               M-c l         crossword-check-letter
               M-c w         crossword-check-word
               M-c p         crossword-check-puzzle

All correctly and incorrectly solved squares will be fontified accordingly. Correctly solved square can no longer be edited. Errors for each square are logged and you are reminded of them at the bottom of the grid buffer when you visit the square in the future.

You can also ask the program to give you a break and solve parts of the puzzle for you:

               M-s l         crossword-solve-letter
               M-s w         crossword-solve-word
               M-s p         crossword-solve-puzzle

You can browse the list of clues in the other two buffers by setting your current navigation direction (ie. across or down) and using an intuitive keybinding with a 'Meta' prefix. I don't expect that you'll need to use these features much because as you navigate within the grid, the program auto-magically re-centers the other buffers around the whatever are the current clues. Anyway, here are the command names ad default key-bindings:

               M-up>         crossword-clue-scroll-up
               M-down>       crossword-clue-scroll-down
               M-<next>      crossword-clue-scroll-page-up
               M-<prior>     crossword-clue-scroll-page-down
               M-<home>      crossword-clue-scroll-page-home
               M-<end>       crossword-clue-scroll-page-end

If you want to play against the clock, toggle the timer on (and off):

               M-p           crossword-pause-unpause-time
               M-t           crossword-pause-unpause-timer

That about does it, doesn't it? Here are some of the 'intuitive' navigation keybindings given special attention:

              <left>         crossword-prior-char
              <right>        crossword-next-char
              <RET>          crossword-next-char
              <delete>       crossword-del-char
              SPC            crossword-del-char
              <baskspace>    crossword-bsp-char
              C-a            crossword-begin-field
              C-e            crossword-end-field
              <TAB>          crossword-next-field
              <backtab>      crossword-prior-field

Feedback:

  • It's best to contact me by opening an 'issue' on the program's github repository (see above) or, distant second-best, by direct e-mail.

  • Code contributions are welcome and github starring is appreciated.

  • Please share your knowledge of other download resources, free software resources, and puzzle formats.

Compatibility:

The software has been tested on emacs version 26.1 and and emacs 28 snapshot, both in debian on a linux terminal (non-GUI).

Several puzzle file formats exist. This software, as currently written, parses the .puz file format created sometime in the 1990's by Literate Software LLC[1] and used initially by them for their 'across' line of software for creating, solving and sharing crossword puzzles. This format has supposedly since become the de facto standard for the genre[2][3].

[1] http://www.litsoft.com/

[2] http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PUZ_%28crossword_puzzles%29

[3] https://code.google.com/archive/p/puz/wikis/FileFormat.wiki The contents at this URL were mangled, so I reformatted it to properly display its tables and code blocks in an org-mode file. See docs/crossword_puz_format.org.

Download resources:

This project wouldn't be useful without people sharing puzzles for free network download. A big thanks are due to Martin_Herbach for being the provider of all the default download resources pre-configured in this sotware.

Please let me know of other resources that can be added.

Check these URLs for links to other puzzles. In many cases, you need to look for a link labeled something like 'across-lite format' or 'puz format':

Comparable software:

I'm not aware of any other similar software for the linux terminal. The following may be of interest to readers. Please let me know of other projects.

Colophon

Some other Emacs software that I've published