wordle-aid 1.10

CLI program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle game problems

WORDLE-AID

wordle-aid is a Linux command line program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle problems. You run this program specifying your previous guesses and results, and then the program outputs a list of candidate words in English frequency usage order to your terminal.

The following example Wordle (#21) solution illustrates how to use it.

1. Choose any starting word as normal. You can even use wordle-aid to help with this, e.g.

   # print all 5 letter words, in reverse frequency order to screen:
   $ wordle-aid .....
   
   # Or, print all 5 letter words with at least 3 vowels:
   $ wordle-aid -v3 .....
   
   # Or, print all 5 letter words with at least 3 vowels and all unique letters:
   $ wordle-aid -v3 -u .....
   

2. We choose our favorite starting word TRACE as the first guess, which gives the result shown on the first line of the image above. Based on this result, run:

   $ wordle-aid TracE ..a..
   ...
   feast 4166016
   yeast 6083904
   heath 6139151
   dealt 6174968
   beats 6367861
   beast 14787561
   seats 17070818
   meant 17832930
   death 83216831
   least 111229798
   

   The output above is the list of possible candidate words, given the command line word arguments you have specified.

   Note: Specify the 1st guess word you used and set each yellow (i.e. correct but incorrect position) letter to upper-case, and other letters to lower-case. Specify all green (i.e. correct and in position) letters you have found so far in the right (wildcard) field in their correct position.

3. Choose a word from the suggestion list output from above command. We choose to enter the highest frequency candidate LEAST from the list, which gives the result shown on the second line in the the image above. Then run:

   $ wordle-aid TracE leasT .ea..
   ...
   beata 134085
   beatz 158324
   keath 158670
   neato 182680
   beaty 209357
   meaty 395095
   neath 571177
   meath 773366
   heath 6139151
   death 83216831
   

4. Choose a word from the suggestion list output from the above command. We choose to enter the highest frequency result DEATH, which gives us the final correct answer.

In summary, specify ..... (all wildcards) as your starting result and insert characters to it as your find them, i.e. all green letters from each guess. Note that the number of wildcard characters determines the Wordle game word size (e.g. wordle-aid bundle ...... for a 6 letter game). Specify your previous word guesses earlier on the command line. They don't actually have to be in the order that you guessed them although likely you will be re-editing from your command history so they will be. Yellow letter guesses (i.e. letter valid but in incorrect place) are entered as upper case, and dark/grey letter guesses (i.e. letter not present anywhere) are entered as lower case. Green letters (i.e. letter valid and in correct place) can be lower or upper case in the earlier word arguments, but must be specified in the final wildcard word (as either lower or upper case) .

Word Dictionary

Wordle-aid embeds a copy of the Kaggle English Word Frequency CSV file which contains about 333 thousand of the most common english words on the web. You can use an alternative file using the -d/--dictfile option. You can make this alternative file your default by specifing --dictfile as a default starting option.

Installation or Upgrade

Arch users can install wordle-aid from the AUR.

Python 3.6 or later is required. Note wordle-aid is on PyPI so just ensure that python3-pip and python3-wheel are installed then type the following to install (or upgrade):

$ sudo pip3 install -U wordle-aid

Or, to install from this source repository:

$ git clone http://github.com/bulletmark/wordle-aid
$ cd wordle-aid
$ sudo pip3 install -U .

To upgrade from the source repository:

$ cd wordle-aid # i.e. to git source dir above
$ git pull
$ sudo pip3 install -U .

Wordle-aid runs on pure Python. No 3rd party packages are required.

Command Line Options

usage: wordle-aid [-h] [-d DICTFILE] [-v VOWELS] [-u] words [words ...]

CLI program to filter word choices to aid solving Wordle game problems.

positional arguments:
  words                 list of attempted words. Upper case letter is right
                        letter but wrong place. Lower case letter is wrong
                        letter anywhere. Last word is wildcards for current
                        matches.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DICTFILE, --dictfile DICTFILE
                        alternative dictionary+frequency text file, default =
                        /usr/share/wordle-aid/words.txt.
  -v VOWELS, --vowels VOWELS
                        exclude words with less than this number of unique
                        vowels
  -u, --unique          exclude words with non-unique letters

Note you can set default starting arguments in your ~/.config/wordle-aid-
flags.conf.

Default Command Arguments

You can add default arguments to a personal configuration file ~/.config/wordle-aid-flags.conf. If that file exists then each line of arguments will be concatenated and automatically prepended to your wordle-aid command line arguments. You may want to use this to specify --dictfile to use a different default word dictionary file.

License

Copyright (C) 2022 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.