bug#17742: Support for enchant?

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1233 bytes --]

It would be good if Emacs supported the Enchant multi-back-end spelling
engine wrapper, as this allows users to configure spelling preferences more
flexibly than Emacs (in particular, to use different spell-checking engines
for different languages), and the configuration works for programs other
than Emacs.

It seems that it would be pretty trivial to add, since Emacs already works
fine (since 2007) if you set ispell-program-name to /usr/bin/enchant.

Enchant supports UTF-8 (and only UTF-8) as an encoding, so for optimum
functionality, I guess support would need to be added to
ispell-encoding8-command (though since this is enchant's only mode of
operation, it's unclear that anything needs to be done).

In a wider GNU context, the GNU aspell developer wrote a few years ago: "I
believe Aspell future depends on making Enchant the system spell
checker."[1] Enchant itself seems to be stable, portable, and support a
wide range of spelling checker engines, including all those that Emacs
already supports; it would be great longer-term to be able to simplify
ispell.el by requiring Enchant, and thereby being able to rely on its UTF-8
support and single set of simple options.

[1] http://aspell.net/

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1459 bytes --]