7.3 Initialization File

When you start dico, it automatically executes commands from its initialization files (or init files, for short), normally called .dico. Two init files are read: the one located in your home directory, and the one from the current working directory. It is not an error if any or both of these files are absent.

These files contain a series of dico commands, as described in Interactive Mode, with the only difference that no command prefix is used by default. The ‘#’ character introduces a comment: any characters from (and including) ‘#’ up to the newline character are ignored⁴.

Init files are useful to change the defaults for your dico invocation. Consider, for example, this init file:

# An example init file for dico

# Turn the welcome banner off
quiet yes
# Set the location of autologin file
autologin ~/.dicologin
# Use this server by default
open dict.org
# Search in all databases
database *
# Finally, set the custom command prefix
prefix :

Notice, that if you wish to change your command prefix, it is preferable to do it as a last command in your init file, as shown in this example.