Mathew Brown

I Published an Offline Reader for the Jargon File

23 July 2026 • 2 min read
android privacy open-source fdroid hacker-culture jargon-file
Table of Contents

I own a paperback copy of The New Hacker's Dictionary. It's been on my shelf for years, the MIT Press edition of the Jargon File, and I still pull it down every so often just to read entries at random. When I sat down to build the next hackerapps.com app, I didn't have to think hard about what to make. I made an offline reader for it.

It's called Jargon.

What it does

Jargon bundles the entire Jargon File — more than 2,300 entries — inside the app. No network permission, no account, nothing fetched at runtime. You browse it alphabetically with a fast-scroll index, or search across terms and definitions.

Jargon app showing an alphabetized list of dictionary entries with a fast-scroll index on the right

Every definition renders its cross-references as tappable links, so reading "see also" actually takes you somewhere instead of leaving you to search for a specific spelling by hand. You can favorite entries, or just hit the shuffle button and read whatever it lands on.

Jargon app showing the full definition of the entry "hacker," including its eight numbered senses and etymology

That's the entry for hacker above — all eight senses of it, including the deprecated eighth sense ("a malicious meddler… the correct term for this sense is cracker"). It's the entry I keep coming back to, and it's why hackerapps.com has the name it does.

What the Jargon File actually is

If you haven't run into it before: the Jargon File started in 1975 as a word list passed around the Stanford AI Lab and MIT, documenting the slang that hackers actually used — terms for code, hardware, bugs, and the surrounding culture. It grew for decades under a long line of editors, most notably Eric Raymond and Guy Steele, who eventually shaped it into the print edition sitting on my shelf.

The content hasn't changed in any real way since Raymond's last pass in December 2003. The "community edition" repository I pulled it from re-hosts that same snapshot — it's had exactly one non-cosmetic commit since 2021. That's not a knock on it. Some references don't need to keep growing to stay worth reading. This one reads like a time capsule of a specific, real culture, and it's a better history lesson than most things claiming to teach you what "hacker" used to mean before the word got taken over by news headlines about break-ins.

I mean hacker in that original sense throughout hackerapps.com: someone curious about how things work, willing to take them apart and put them back together differently. Not someone breaking into systems. The Jargon File makes that distinction explicit, in its own definition of the word, which felt like the right foundation to build the second app on.

Getting it

The source is on GitHub at AnalogGhost/jargon under GPLv3 — grab a release APK directly from there. Dictionary content stays under the Jargon File's own CC BY-SA 4.0 license, credited in the app's About screen.

It's also on its way to F-Droid — the submission is in for review now, reproducible build verified and all.

There's another hackerapps.com app coming together already. More on that soon.

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