Note - Hello world!

2021-03-07

A notepad

It was time to create a blog so I can stop having to peruse the internet for the solutions I found earlier.

So this will essentially be a public notepad of the things I come upon or learn.

Topics will probably range from: Carpentry(the trade you require a hammer for) to Rust(the language).

Do not expect words entered in perfection.

Spacemacs - spell-checking with hunspell(OS X)

2021-03-07

Sometimes it is nice to have some spellchecking squiggles even in your code editor.

Steps to get up and running

  1. Add the spell-checking layer in your dotfile.
  2. Install hunspell using your package manager(brew in my case)
  3. download some .aff and .dic files, found this repository to be a useful source: https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries

You could have any number of dictionaries you would like and alter between them as you see fit, but to start out I suggest picking what you are hoping to use as a default. I chose to use en, which you can download like so:

> wget https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries/blob/main/dictionaries/en/index.dic -O en.dic
> wget https://github.com/wooorm/dictionaries/blob/main/dictionaries/en/index.aff -O en.aff

I named my filesen.dic and en.aff, but you could name them whatever you prefer, just remember to set your DICTIONARY env appropriately(if you need to do that). Best practice is to use the language codes i.e. en_GB, sv_SE

I made sure to soft link these files as follows as well:

> ln -s en.dic default.dic
> ln -s en.aff default.aff
> ln -s en.dic english.dic
> ln -s en.aff english.aff

The default is what hunspell uses if you do not pick a dictionary(hunspell -d /dev/null and you’ll see), however this does not transfer to ispell in emacs. ispell will use what matches your LANG or DICTIONARY environment variables so I personally set DICTIONARY to match up with my choice, but you could do one of the following:

  • Change your emacs LANG env
  • Rename the dictionary files to match you LANG env.
  • Change your DICTIONARY env

I went with the latter, as my knee jerk feeling to alter the LANG felt wrong. To set your DICTIONARY env, the easiest is to open up your ~/.spacemacs.env file and just add: DICTIONARY=<preferred lang>; in my case: DICTIONARY=en.

A swift: SPC + f + e + R and you should be getting all the red squiggles you could hope for!

Resources

https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+checkers/spell-checking/README.html https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractiveSpell