Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

[Jason Rumney <jasonrumney@gmail.com>]

On Jun 1, 12:42 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Jason Rumney wrote:
> > On May 31, 12:16 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
>
> >> Lennart's Emacs is patched native w32 build I think. You might need
> >> aspell from here:
>
> >>http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/aspell/
>
> >> I don't know whether you also need w32 kde or not or even what that
> >> might mean.
>
> > You don't need KDE to use aspell. If you want to be sure that there
> > are no KDE dependencies, you can also download aspell fromhttp://aspell.net/win32/
>
> Thanks, Jason. I did download that one first (1.19 meg
> Aspell-0-50-3-3-Setup.exe) but then found the other 0.60 version (aspell
> binary only). Can I install the 0.50 and then copy the newer file(s) on
> top of them? All my GnuWin32 tools are in a flat directory C:\gnu and
> this is included in my PATH, but after winnt/system32. Name collisions
> like sort, ftp, etc. will try to run the MS versions first.
>
>
>
> >> but most of the paths in this file refer to glunix directory structure
>
> > If aspell.exe is in your PATH, Emacs will find it. But on Windows, it
> > is conventional for installers to not put executables in the PATH, or
> > even to set PATH to include the directory they install to.
> > Unfortunately many installers for ports of GNU tools also follow this
> > convention, even though GNU tools are designed to collaborate
> > together, rather than be used as a monolithic application, so it may
> > be necessary to customize ispell-program to the full path of
> > aspell.exe.
>
> So is this on the right track then:
>
> (defcustom ispell-program-name

ispell-program-name is already defined in ispell.el. You probably want
to use setq here.

>    (or "C:/gnu/aspell"
>        "ispell")

The above is the same as "C:/gnu/aspell".

> (or (locate-file "c:/gnu/aspell" exec-path exec-suffixes 'file-executable-p)
>        "ispell")

Since you're supplying the full path, you don't really need to locate-
file unless you are unsure which of exec-suffixes applies.

(file-executable-p "c:/gnu/aspell.exe")

Should be enough if you find the behaviour of falling back on "ispell"
useful when aspell does not exist in that location.