We’re big fans of the pattern-matcher Qat here but it’s got its limitations. For one, you can’t use your own word list when fetching results, so you have to rely on Qat’s lists. Secondly, the results aren’t ordered by “interest” in any way, so you have to deal with whatever comes out no matter how uninteresting. Third — and this will matter more to some than others — it’s not open-source.
Well, we’ve fixed some of those issues with our release of Umiaq, available now. Umiaq is a Python script that can do most of what Qat can do, but it allows you to run it against your own word list and presents results ordered by score. It’s certainly not perfect, though — some simple queries like
A.;.A
take forever to run. So if you’ve got some coding skills and want to improve what could be a very useful tool, feel free to fork the repo and make a PR! We’re hoping the community can come together and take this from a somewhat useful tool to a must-have.