Question

I’m using Aspell as a spelling checker for Emacs.
I know that, as a standalone, aspell can handle multpiple dictionaries (using extra-dicts param), but how to configure it under Emacs?

I know very little of emacs lisp… Could I provide some “ispell extra-args” in .emacs file? Would that work? If so I’d really appreciate simple example – I know very little of lisp syntax and absolute/relative paths it handles and etc.

The reason why I need this is that I sometimes write some documentation in Polish with English words in it. That makes spell-check-region much less attractive task than it is using single language in a file.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I’m assuming that aspell is set as your ispell-program-name (you can do this in customize).

( Add these to your .emacs or .emacs.d/init.el )

You can add multiple dictionaries to the ispell-dictionary-alist (syntax is a bit complex, get more info in Emacs help with: C-h v ispell-dictionary-alist)

Example.

 '(ispell-dictionary-alist (quote (
       ("english" "[A-Za-z]" "[^A-Za-z]" "[']" nil ("-B") nil iso-8859-1)
       ("polish" "[A-Za-z¡£¦¬¯±³¶¼¿ÆÊÑÓæêñó]" "[^A-Za-z¡£¦¬¯±³¶¼¿ÆÊÑÓæêñó]" "" nil ("-d" "polish") nil iso-8859-2)
       ))
  )

You could also bind dictionary swapping to the keyboard.

e.g.

    (global-set-key (kbd "M-8") 
            (lambda () 
              (interactive) 
              (ispell-change-dictionary "american" nil))) ; "british" and "english" are also valid.