Cursewords, a crossword puzzle-solving interface for the terminal | Hacker News Reader

Cursewords, a crossword puzzle-solving interface for the terminal

parkerhiggins.net

62 pointsrishabhd22 comments

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This is awesome! I had no idea .puz files were a thing.

I wrote a "replica" of the NYTimes Crosswords while I was learning React [1].

https://github.com/gzzo/crosswords

Demo:

https://shopkeeper-capacity-56747.netlify.com/puzzle/oscar

very neat indeed.

relatedly, if anyone is interested in creating puz files from the command line, i have a tool to do it: https://github.com/martindemello/pangrid. it can read the acrosslite text format [https://www.litsoft.com/across/docs/AcrossTextFormat.pdf] and generate a .puz file from it.

This is very cool!

There's a great web-based tool for making your own puzzles available here: http://www.keiranking.com/phil/ (with export to the .puz format).

Really useful for both creating an initial grid and for suggesting possible fill based on existing crossing words.

Huge fan of Phil! Keiran and I are both alumni of the Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/) from around the same time. It's become a real crossword programmer powerhouse.

It also has a SAT based-solver telling you when you get stuck (ie when there is no completion of the grid using words from its dictionary), but I'm not sure whether the WASM integration for it still works.

I think you've done a great job with the terminal interface/rendering.

Here's my own pet unfinished terminal .puz player: https://github.com/rparrett/puzterm

Next to Cursewords, mine looks super clunky.

Oh man! I didn't know there was prior art. I think yours looks great, Rob, and I'm very eager to get it installed and compare notes. I'm impressed that you got all the clues displayed at once.

Where do I file bug reports? Any attempt to save results in: AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode' on line 273.

Still, this is really, really good.

This is great! Looks much sleeker than Across Lite.

Is there any way to change the keyboard shortcuts? Or even list what the current shortcuts are? Both `space` and `return` toggle between across and down. It would be nice if I could make `return` advanced to the next clue instead, which is the default behavior in the NYT app.

There isn't such a way yet, but I want to do that in the future. (This 1.0 version doesn't have any kind of persistent settings, so there's not yet a place to store custom key-mappings.)

In case you want to try out my defaults: `tab` and `shift+tab` advance/retreat words to the next blank, and `page up` and `page down` (on a Mac, `fn` + `up` or `down`) do blank-agnostic word advance/retreat.

(I also haven't documented this yet, but `[`/`]` and `{`/`}` do cursor-perpendicular box-wise movement in blank-agnostic and blank-aware steps, respectively. One of the hardest parts of this is just describing these kinds of movement.)

Very cool. Are there any public repositories of puz files, or at least some sample puz file to test this out?

a few of the download links here work (try the washington post e.g.): https://crosswordfiend.com/download/

There are a lot of crossword constructors who publish/sell their puzzles independently on the Internet, and often they create both puz and pdf files. Some sources of free ones:

- Brendan Emmett Quigley: https://www.brendanemmettquigley.com/

- Paolo Pasco: http://gridsthesedays.blogspot.com/

- and see the sidebar of Paolo's blog for links to many more constructors

- They stopped publishing these online, but the Chronicle of Higher Education has several old crosswords here: https://www.chronicle.com/section/Crosswords/43

I wanted to ship it with an original demo puzzle but construction is really hard! That's on the roadmap for the future.

Oh also: if you're an NY Times crossword subscriber, you can download any of their puzzles as .puz files.

Feel free to include http://levien.com/Social%20rule.puz , which has a Recurse theme. It's not top quality but I've had a number of people tell me they enjoy it.

Raph! I loved that puzzle (and I've solved it in cursewords)! I may try to get together a collection of freely licensed demo puzzles, and I'd be honored to include this.

Now we just need to hook this to the cloud so I can save the state of any puzzle, and add new puzzles to my personal puzzle repo easier.

A locally mounted cloud storage directory may be all you need since the state seems to be kept inside the .puz file itself.

This is correct. Also, since it's a terminal app, you can probably just ssh into your puzzle box from wherever :)

putting the clue numbers in the middle of the grid lines is a brilliant touch

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