I found a plugin that makes web calls to provide a thesaurus, and I also found instructions to use thesaurus-files with Vim, but I wanted to ask if anyone knows if Vim comes with a thesaurus file? Where can we find a nice, mostly complete English thesaurus file, so that I don't need to use an internet-dependent plugin? I see no reason to use a local file on disk for this unless it is more than a few hundred megabytes.
Incidentally I am exploring this topic because I discovered that the thesaurus helps a lot for creating sensible variable names. One day I chased a strange bug for a while and discovered by declaring function process that I overwrote this global variable and it broke the world. That was a nice little lesson and today I just tried to write another variable and name it process and it made me want to use a thesaurus.
Anyhow, I digress. I am a programmer but having a thesaurus is a feature that word processor folks have had figured out for a while because I used it a lot in my middle school essay-writing days.
Here is a potential wrinkle that I can foresee though. If a good proper thesaurus is really big, and if the Vim implementation is a bit naive it is possible that loading a big thesaurus file might bloat up the running Vim processes. I'd rather not do that and it may make sense to fall back to the online plugin depending on this.
