Re: Spell Checking

[kgold@watson.ibm.com (kgold)]

"Shug Boabby" <Shug.Boabby@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> i realise the flyspell and spell checking .el files heavily depend upon
> spell/ispell/aspell being installed on the system, but many modern GUI
> libs (such as GTK+2 with GtkSpell and OS X's Aqua/Cocoa) have the
> ability to add spell checking to any text-input window. can anyone see
> this kind of spellchecking becoming available in GNU Emacs in the
> future?
> 
> in GTK+2 it is really just a 2-liner in the source to add the support.
> but of course that won't do context stuff (like not checking maths
> equations in LaTeX mode) but i'm sure it could be worked around.
> 
> at the moment i have to maintain 2 dictionaries on OS X as Emacs is not
> making use of the system one, its quite irritating... also, these
> methods are *much* faster than flyspell.

IMHO, it's the context sensitive spell checker that makes emacs/ispell
so useful.  My guess is that most emacs users are writing text with
markup (code, tex, html, ...) and the ability to check the text while
ignoring the markup is critical.

I used to wonder why people's C code had so many spelling errors,
until I realized that only emacs can spell check the comments and
strings and ignore the code.

And my periodic question:

When I spell check comments and strings and the string is part of
a printf

	printf("\tHello, world\n");

I'd like the spell checker to ignore the letter after the \.
Currently, it complains that tHello is misspelled, causing many false
errors.

-- 
Ken Goldman   kgold@watson.ibm.com   914-784-7646