monotux.tech


Emacs, hunspell & multiple languages

Emacs

While writing yesterdays post I realized that some spellchecking might be good. And, as always, there are some quirks to fix in my setup.

I mostly write in English when on my laptop & using Emacs, due to $REASONS. But every now and then (and often enough for me to consider fixing it) I write in my first language, Swedish. So having a setup that would allow me to switch between them would be great.

The snippet below expects two (or more!) languages in the local variable languages. I’ve saved lots of CPU time by not typing out that language list everywhere. ^_^

(with-eval-after-load "ispell"
  (let ((languages "en_US,sv_SE"))
    ;; Change this path to whatever is relevant for you!
    (setenv "DICPATH" (expand-file-name "~/.nix-profile/share/hunspell/"))
    (setenv "LANG" (car (split-string languages ",")))
    (setq ispell-program-name "hunspell"
          ispell-dictionary languages
          ispell-personal-dictionary "~/.hunspell_personal")
    (ispell-set-spellchecker-params)
    (ispell-hunspell-add-multi-dic languages)
    (unless (file-exists-p ispell-personal-dictionary)
      (write-region "" nil ispell-personal-dictionary nil 0))))

The snippet is shamelessly stol…adapted from this article. I can now switch dictionaries with M-x ispell-change-dictionary, and I typically use it together with M-x flyspell-mode for writing.