Re: Speck (Spell checker for Emacs)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2015 14:18:03 +0200
> From: Alexander Shukaev <haroogan@gmail.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> ​What I wonder is why Speck is not so popular, it seems not so many people
> use it or even know about it.

I can tell you my reasons: because it's not bundled, and as result
suffers from being not quite up-to-date with the latest developments
in the modern spellers (see my previous message).

> What do others use for spell checking?  Flyspell?

Yes.

> Personally, I have to admit that my experiences with Flyspell
> are terrible as it is extremely slow and continuously stutters
> Emacs.

Try customizing flyspell-duplicate-distance to a small value, perhaps
even to zero.  I have found this minor and easy-to-give-up-on feature
to be one major reason for slowdown.

> Even `flyspell-lazy' does not help.  On the other hand, Speck seems
> to be working truly (or almost truly) asynchronously and therefore I
> experience no stutters or slowdowns.

But what Speck does has its downsides as well: if you are a fast
typist, you can be quite a few words after the mis-spelled one, before
the timer fires and the mistake is marked as such.  By contrast,
Flyspell shows the mistake immediately after the word is finished, so
you can easily correct/retype it.  TANSTAAFL.

> By the way, do you have any recipe to teach Speck to spell check only text
> in TeX files (i.e. skip commands)?

Another thing that "just works" with ispell.el and Flyspell.