Working on your own computer

Course resources

Set these tools up once on each account you use. A lab computer provides the terminal; ling, the dictionary, and uv are installed per account.

Open a terminal

A terminal is a window where you enter commands and read their output. Open one on the computer you use:

Computer Terminal
Lab computer Ghostty
macOS Terminal (Applications › Utilities)
Linux Any terminal
Windows Ubuntu on WSL (installing WSL)

Command Prompt and PowerShell do not provide these commands. If you have no terminal, use a lab computer.

Check that the terminal works:

grep --version

A version number confirms that grep is available. If the command is not recognized, check which terminal you opened against the table above.

Set up ling (lingrep)

Use ling 0.5.0 with the class 3 and class 4 prepared corpora. Reading these corpora requires no dictionary.

ling is distributed from the lingrep repository. Its installation guide covers the manual archive download and running under Nix, and the command guide lists every option.

In your working folder dh-b-2026, run these commands one line at a time:

curl -fLO https://github.com/borh/lingrep/releases/download/v0.5.0/install.sh
sh install.sh

The installer selects the archive for your computer and installs ling for your user account. It supports Apple silicon and Intel Macs, and Linux or WSL on x86-64 and arm64. The Linux build requires glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04 or newer).

Close and reopen the terminal, then check the version:

ling --version

Setup is complete when ling 0.5.0 is printed. If another version appears, run command -v ling: the path it prints is the installation your terminal uses. Remove that older installation, run the installer again, and open a new terminal.

Before updating ling or replacing an extracted course folder, save your edited pattern files and notes elsewhere. Download and extract the course ZIP again after updating: prepared corpora from an earlier version may require rebuilding. If ling corpus inspect reports a format or normalization error, your ling is older than the one that built the ZIP: update to the version named on this page and run inspect again.

How do I analyze a new text with the course dictionary?

The download is about 1 GB and the installed dictionary occupies about 3.4 GB.

Install the novel UniDic once, then name its file when analyzing your own text:

ling dictionary install novel
export LINGREP_DICTIONARY_PATH="${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/lingrep/dictionaries/unidic-novel-202512.dic"
ling doctor

ling doctor should print ling readiness: ready. Run the export line again after reopening the terminal. With no explicit dictionary setting, ling uses an installed cwj dictionary, which differs from the course’s novel dictionary.

Run a course notebook

Notebook commands start with uvx, which is part of the Python package manager uv.

  1. Install uv with this command in the terminal. It is the same on macOS, Linux, and WSL; uv’s installation instructions list other methods.

    curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

  2. Close and reopen the terminal, then run uv --version. If it prints a version number, uvx is available too.

  3. Download the notebook’s ZIP bundle, unpack it, and move into that folder with cd.

  4. Run the command shown on the notebook’s page, such as the NER comparison.

  5. Open the local URL that the terminal prints.

The first run downloads Python packages and needs an internet connection. Leave the terminal open while you work; press Ctrl+C to stop the notebook.

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