Behaviourism Glossary

Fuzzy-search the 258-term Behaviour Analysis Glossary from animallearning.org — radical-behaviourism vocabulary at your launcher.

Why this exists

I came to behaviourism through Sylvan Franklin's work at The Vestibule — his Skinner-lineage teaching of classical behaviourism is what drew me into the field and onto animallearning.org in the first place. Once I started using the glossary I found myself going back to it constantly, hence the Vicinae extension (with notes for porting to Raycast — see Port to Raycast below).

The glossary itself is © animallearning.org, maintained by Juju & Ana. This extension reproduces it verbatim for offline fuzzy-search — if the data is useful to you, go support the source.

Features

• 258 behaviour-analysis terms, definitions copied verbatim from the source
• Fuzzy search across terms, acronyms (DRO, DRA, FR, VR, FI, VI, CRF, MTS…), and categories
• Detail pane with the full definition rendered as markdown
• Light-touch category grouping (Schedules, Verbal Behavior, Stimulus Control, Reinforcement & Punishment, …)
• One-keystroke actions: copy definition, copy term, open source page
• Fully local — no network calls, no telemetry

Install

Vicinae (Linux)

Requires Vicinae and the vici CLI on PATH.

git clone https://github.com/arch-err/behaviourism-glossary.git
cd behaviourism-glossary
npm install
npm run dev

npm run dev registers the extension with the running Vicinae daemon and hot-reloads on file changes. For a packaged artifact use npm run build.

Port to Raycast (todo)

No Raycast variant ships today. The @vicinae/api package mirrors @raycast/api closely, so porting is mostly mechanical:

1. Replace @vicinae/api with @raycast/api in package.json
2. Update the import in src/behaviourism-glossary.tsx to @raycast/api
3. Drop the $schema and vici-specific scripts in favour of ray develop

Patch locally if you need it before the port lands.

Usage

Open your launcher, type "behaviour" (or your fuzzy-match of choice), pick the Search Glossary command. Inside:

• Type a term: differential reinforcement, mand, escape
• Type an acronym: DRO, FI, MTS, CRF, EAB
• Type a category: schedules, verbal, aversive

Enter copies the definition. The secondary action copies the term. Tertiary action opens the source page on animallearning.org.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # live in Vicinae
npm run lint     # vici lint
npm run format   # biome format --write src
npm run build    # vici build

vicinae-env.d.ts is auto-generated by the Vicinae tooling (vici dev / vici build) from the manifest. It's gitignored — don't edit it by hand, and don't worry if it's missing right after git clone; the first dev/build run will create it.

Source layout:

src/
  behaviourism-glossary.tsx   # the List view
  glossary.ts                  # the 258-entry data file

Acknowledgements

• Sylvan Franklin / The Vestibule — whose Skinner-lineage teaching of classical behaviourism is what got me into the field in the first place
• Juju & Ana / animallearning.org — maintainers of the source glossary; go support them if this is useful
• Vicinae — Raycast-compatible launcher on Linux
• Raycast — the upstream API that @vicinae/api mirrors

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Glossary content is © animallearning.org and is reproduced here with attribution for offline reference.