Re: ispell.el and pipes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: André A. Gomes <andremegafone@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 22:40:19 +0300
> 
> If the old farts (no offence) insist on using *Choices*, then using
> ascii characters is silly.  There should be a variable that gives an
> upper-bound for spelling suggestions perhaps.  If that bound would be 10
> by default, then just use the digits.  Otherwise, the characters used
> should be latin lower-case english letters.  (Typing digits is hard).
> Either one or two letters, depending on the number of suggestions.  That
> gives as much as (expt 26 2) choices, which is more than enough.

A tempest in a teapot, if you ask me.  I'm a heavy user of
spell-checking, always have been.  IME, the correct choice is almost
always '0', rarely '1', i.e. the very first candidates.  If you see
something else, switch to a different speller.  Or use the drop-down
menu of Flyspell ("C-c $").

So I wouldn't burn cycles on trying to improve the UI here.  But
that's me.

(The historical reason why Ispell uses digits is that this is how the
UI of the original Ispell worked; Hunspell still behaves the same even
today.)