Spell Check on The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Setting up enchant for use with flyspell-mode on macOS

Timo Geusch — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:00:00 -0500

I have a few more loose ends to tidy up before switching to the static version of the blog. One of the important tasks was to make sure I had a spell checker available. Back in the dim and distant past I had set up flyspell-mode with hunspell, but I wanted to check if there was something better available these days. Enter enchant, which acts as a front end to multiple, different spell checkers. I like that Emacs has included support for enchant since version 26, plus one of the backends enchant supports is AppleSpell. In other words, when running on macOS, flyspell can make use of the OS’s built in spell checker and dictionaries.

Instructions on how to actually set up enchant on macOS are a bit thin on the ground, so I decided that I’ll put together a quick write up.

Setting up Emacs spell checking on OS X

Timo Geusch — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 21:16:00 +0000

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m trying to improve my blogging workflow by using org2blog to draft my posts before pushing them to my WordPress blog. When I posted yesterday I had the basic workflow going, could edit posts in Emacs, save them, update drafts and push them to WordPress. The last piece that was missing was getting spell checking to work.

I’ve actually never spent much time thinking about spell checkers until I discovered that OS X doesn’t come with a spell checker that ispell recognises. A little research led me to Joel Kuiper’s blog post on spell checking in Emacs on Mac OS X. I decided to install Hunspell as it seemed to be modern, supported and able to do the job. Plus, it’s available via Homebrew which I’m already using to install other Unix software on my OS X machine. A quick