I recently had some time off from work and decided to finish a project I started a few years ago. Kensaku is basically like Jisho but in your terminal. I made it because I wanted a tool that could look up kanji using the radical names from WaniKani instead of searching for them visually in a table. So for example, you could look up 賀 with the command kensaku kanji --radicals power shellfish --strokes 12. I’ve also extracted unknown words from books I plan to read with pandoc and mecab and then used kensaku to bulk generate vocabulary flashcards for Anki.
You can read more about what kensaku can do and find installation instructions here. I’d love to hear any feedback you have or any features you’d like to see added. I’m also happy to help if you have any questions about how to use it.
If there is sufficient interest, I may consider adding a GUI (Graphical User Interface) in a future version.
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WOW.
This’s so cool.
I need to try this sometime. I had to research the meaning of GUI and I need some time to study how to install it, but I loved the idea.
I have difficulty researching other sources because the radicals are different and I still don’t know how to count the strokes.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but it would be awesome if you could import non-Wanikani kanji and make it possible to search for meaning using wanikani radicals.
Thanks for mentioning that GUI wasn’t self-evident. I sometimes forget which programmer words aren’t commonplace to other people. If you have any trouble getting it set up, please don’t hesitate to ask questions here or to create an issue on the GitHub repository.
The underlying dataset has about 13,000 kanji and lists radicals for around 6,300 of them. All of those should support search by the actual radical characters, their WaniKani meanings, or their meanings according to the Unicode standard. Letting users load their own list of custom radical mnemonics is on the roadmap.
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