Re: setup spell checking in windows emacs with emacsW32

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

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 from http://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
   (or "C:/gnu/aspell"
       "ispell")
;; anyway (or "this" "that") returns "this" without error in scratch
;; but the function in context wouldn't work in general if aspell 
weren't there.
;; maybe this is a better guess:

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

"Program invoked by \\[ispell-word] and \\[ispell-region] commands."
   :type 'string
   :group 'ispell)