Spellchecking in Emacs

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I do most–nay, all–of my writing in Emacs, and realize that one of the things people will miss the most when coming from something like Microsoft Word or Libre Office is a spell checker. There are several great reasons not to worry about it.

1 Exercise Your Brain

The fact is, dependance on spell checkers is bad for us. Just as handwriting is suffering because of the prevalence of typing, spelling is suffering because of dependence upon spell checkers. By stretching yourself without a constant checker, you are exercising your cognition. I’m not saying to avoid the wonderful tools that are spell checkers–just build in a delay so they aren’t a crutch.

2 Spell Check Your Document

Once you’ve written your document it would be foolhardy for even the best spellers to publish without checking it. In emacs this is solved with a quick command:

M-x+! ispell

It will check your whole document or your selected area.

3 Fix that Word Immediately

If you are writing a tweet or short message, you might need to fix that immieiatly. Just hit M+$ and boom–corrected to “immediately” by using ispell-word.

Tory Anderson avatar
Tory Anderson
Full-time Web App Engineer, Digital Humanist, Researcher, Computer Psychologist