You can modify many aspects of KDict's behavior in the preferences dialog. The dialog can be opened via -> or the the toolbar icon.
The preferences dialog.
The dialog is divided into several pages. The button restores the default values for the current page. The button will apply your changes on all pages. The button will apply the changes and close the dialog. The button does this without saving the changes. By the way, you can leave the preferences dialog open and continue your work with KDict. This is a nice way to test your changes.
The internet hostname or the ip address of the DICT server.
This is the port number the server listens on. 2628 is the default port and is used by the most servers.
KDict is able to keep the connection open in short periods of inactivity. This feature avoids the lengthy login procedure before every query. A value of 0 seconds disables this feature. Very large values aren't useful, because in most cases the DICT server will close the connection after a couple of minutes.
This value determines how long KDict will wait for a answer from the server.
The DICT protocol allows the client to send multiple commands in one network packet. The size of the internal command buffer determines how many commands are send in parallel by KDict. You can try to tune this value for your network connection, but in most cases it is not worth the effort.
With this selector the text encoding method of the databases can be specified. The default value is "utf8", this setting should work on most servers. If an encoding is selected that doesn't match the encoding used by the databases, you will see broken characters.
Activate this if you want to provide a authentication with username and password. (a server may require this for access to all databases) You have to enter a valid Username and Password combination below.
On this page you can customize the colors and fonts of the definition view. A proportional font for the normal text will increase readability, but will also destroy the hardcoded layout of tables and similar things in the definitions of some databases.
The layout of the result isn't really configurable yet. But you can decide how many headings (a heading states which database the definition belongs to) KDict should place in the result. The choices should be selfexplaining. Note that changes on this page won't have any effect until you start a new query.
On this page you can modify various limits that prevent KDict from eating up insane amounts of memory.
This limits the number of definitions you can fetch at once by selecting them in the match list.
This number determines how many previous results are held in a internal cache for fast access. You can set this to 0, but this will disable your ability to browse back to old results.
This is the number of past entries the input line remembers. Large values will cause a slower start and shutdown of KDict.
If this is selected, KDict will remember your history between sessions.
If this is selected, KDict will immediately try to define the contents of the clipboard when it is started.
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