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flycheck-aspell

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Spell check in Emacs using Flycheck/Flymake and Aspell

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# Emacs spell check using Aspell

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![flycheck-aspell in action](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leotaku/flycheck-aspell/master/screenshot.png)

The flycheck-aspell and flymake-aspell packages add support for spell checking to Flycheck and Flymake using the [GNU Aspell](http://aspell.net) application.

## Installation

Thanks to [Sam Kleinman](https://github.com/tychoish) and [Chris Rayner](https://github.com/riscy) both flycheck-aspell and flymake-aspell can now be found on MELPA.
Install them using your preferred package installation method.

## Usage

Both packages will use your ispell settings, in particular `ispell-dictionary` and `ispell-local-dictionary` if they are set.
This means you can use `ispell-change-dictionary` to set your preferred language on a per-buffer basis.
Here are some recommended base ispell settings.

```emacs-lisp
(setq ispell-dictionary "your_default_dictionary")
(setq ispell-program-name "aspell")
(setq ispell-silently-savep t)
```

Guides on how to configure both packages can be found in the following separate files:

+ [README-FLYMAKE.md](./README-FLYMAKE.md) :: for Flymake users
+ [README-FLYCHECK.md](./README-FLYCHECK.md) :: for Flycheck users

## General differences to `flyspell-mode`

Emacs already contains a mode for spell checking called `flyspell-mode`. It works by spell-checking words as you type, which allows for constant performance with arbitrarily large files, but also comes with a number of disadvantages. In particular, it cannot highlight misspelled words that have not been near the cursor in your current editing session. Accessing a list of all misspelled words is also impossible. Lastly, because `flyspell-mode` has to run code on every keystroke, it can often cause noticeable input delay and stuttering.

In contrast, `flycheck-aspell` and `flymake-aspell` asynchronously run Aspell in the background and extract a list of all misspelled words in the full document. This ensures a list of misspelled words is always available, which can be accessed with e.g. `flymake-show-diagnostics-buffer` or `flycheck-list-errors`. However, this also means that spell checking performance will slow down approximately linearly with the number of spelling errors. If your file is particularly large it might take a few seconds for new misspelled words to be highlighted. Note that this should never affect editing experience as no additional code is run on user input.

## License

These Emacs packages are distributed under the terms of the GPL-3.0-or-later license, meaning the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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