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This section describes the commands to check the spelling of a single word or of a portion of a buffer. These commands only work if a spelling checker program, one of Hunspell, Aspell, Ispell or Enchant, is installed. These programs are not part of Emacs, but one of them is usually installed on GNU/Linux and other free operating systems. See Aspell.
ispell-word
).
If the region is active, do it for all words in the region instead.
ispell-complete-word
).
To check the spelling of the word around or before point, and
optionally correct it as well, type M-$ (ispell-word
).
If a region is active, M-$ checks the spelling of all words
within the region. See Mark. (When Transient Mark mode is off,
M-$ always acts on the word around or before point, ignoring the
region; see Disabled Transient Mark.)
Similarly, the command M-x ispell performs spell-checking in the region if one is active, or in the entire buffer otherwise. The commands M-x ispell-buffer and M-x ispell-region explicitly perform spell-checking on the entire buffer or the region respectively. To check spelling in an email message you are writing, use M-x ispell-message; that command checks the whole buffer, except for material that is indented or appears to be cited from other messages. See Sending Mail.
When one of these commands encounters what appears to be an incorrect word, it asks you what to do. It usually displays a list of numbered near-misses—words that are close to the incorrect word. Then you must type a single-character response. Here are the valid responses:
query-replace
so you
can replace it elsewhere in the buffer if you wish. (The replacements
will be rescanned for more spelling errors.)
In Text mode and related modes, M-<TAB>
(ispell-complete-word
) performs in-buffer completion based on
spelling correction. Insert the beginning of a word, and then type
M-<TAB>; this shows a list of completions. (If your
window manager intercepts M-<TAB>, type <ESC>
<TAB> or C-M-i.) Each completion is listed with a digit or
character; type that digit or character to choose it.
Once started, the spell-checker subprocess continues to run, waiting for something to do, so that subsequent spell-checking commands complete more quickly. If you want to get rid of the process, use M-x ispell-kill-ispell. This is not usually necessary, since the process uses no processor time except when you do spelling correction.
Spell-checkers look up spelling in two dictionaries:
the standard dictionary and your personal dictionary. The standard
dictionary is specified by the variable ispell-local-dictionary
or, if that is nil
, by the variable ispell-dictionary
.
If both are nil
, the spelling program's default dictionary is
used. The command M-x ispell-change-dictionary sets the
standard dictionary for the buffer and then restarts the subprocess,
so that it will use a different standard dictionary. Your personal
dictionary is specified by the variable
ispell-personal-dictionary
. If that is nil
, the
spelling program looks for a personal dictionary in a default
location, which is specific to each spell-checker.
A separate dictionary is used for word completion. The variable
ispell-complete-word-dict
specifies the file name of this
dictionary. The completion dictionary must be different because it
cannot use the information about roots and affixes of the words, which
spell-checking uses to detect variations of words. For some
languages, there is a spell-checking dictionary but no word completion
dictionary.
Flyspell mode is a minor mode that performs automatic spell-checking
of the text you type as you type it. When it finds a word that it
does not recognize, it highlights that word. Type M-x
flyspell-mode to toggle Flyspell mode in the current buffer. To
enable Flyspell mode in all text mode buffers, add
flyspell-mode
to text-mode-hook
. See Hooks. Note
that, as Flyspell mode needs to check each word across which you move,
it will slow down cursor motion and scrolling commands. It also
doesn't automatically check the text you didn't type or move across;
use flyspell-region
or flyspell-buffer
for that.
When Flyspell mode highlights a word as misspelled, you can click on
it with mouse-2 (flyspell-correct-word
) to display a menu
of possible corrections and actions. In addition, C-. or
<ESC>-<TAB> (flyspell-auto-correct-word
) will
propose various successive corrections for the word at point, and
C-c $ (flyspell-correct-word-before-point
) will pop up a
menu of possible corrections. Of course, you can always correct the
misspelled word by editing it manually in any way you like.
Flyspell Prog mode works just like ordinary Flyspell mode, except
that it only checks words in comments and string constants. This
feature is useful for editing programs. Type M-x
flyspell-prog-mode to enable or disable this mode in the current
buffer. To enable this mode in all programming mode buffers, add
flyspell-prog-mode
to prog-mode-hook
(see Hooks).