aspell: A spellchecker at the console

I’m into a short slew of software that I’ve worked with for quite a while, but want to mention again.

It’s always good to go over old ground. You never know what you’ll notice. Here’s aspell again:

Animated, just for fun. 🙂

I ran into aspell first when I made the shift to charm a few years ago. I brought it out again a few weeks ago for reference and kept it around for a while.

Dictionaries abound in Linux, and aspell makes for a very nice frontend.

Simple word-by-word checks, custom dictionaries, one-key replacement and correction, the ability to ignore or replace words document-wide … all the features you would expect in a standard spellchecker.

Best of all it is light as a feather and can practically nuzzle up to any other application without causing a scene.

Personally, I plan to incorporate this, vim and pip into something vaguely like a homemade word processor. We’ll see how that goes. … 🙄

8 thoughts on “aspell: A spellchecker at the console”

L Michaels 2013/05/15 at 1:01 am

Tried using aspell with a programming editor to spell check document files. Since some programming editors let you jump to a file and line location when you have a list of errors, I wanted to tap that functionality. I wanted the spell check program to emulate output in the same format as the gnu compiler, so it could use functionality already available in the editor. I was able to get aspell to work that way, but it required creating another program that called the aspell library to do so. Also, when I contacted the aspell developers about patches I needed to add to just make the aspell library compile on one of the various operating systems I wanted to use it on, they didn’t want anything to do with it.

I later found out about hunspell. Went through their code and was able to add similar modifications straight into their program, no separate program required. I sent the patches to the hunspell developers and they were very happy to accomodate. They gladly accepted patches to make their program work on other operating systems and to add other functionality. I now exclusively use hunspell.

I’ve recently been investigating textadept which includes a console text editor. I asked and the console version does have functionality to work with error lists such as those created by gnu. So, one could run hunspell on a file in the editor (similar to running gcc on a .c file in a programming editor) and use the error output from hunspell to jump to the lines in the file where spelling errors were found. The concept should work for any programming editor that lets you run a program on the current file and can jump to locations specified by compiler error messages.

Another nice thing about hunspell, there’s a flag so that it can check HTML/SGML formatted files without having to worry about tripping over the HTML tags.