In his post on hippie expand, Mickey Petersen mentioned the abbrev command and its utility as a way of making on-the-fly corrections to common typos and misspellings. I really, really hate having my editor or any input device automatically make corrections but lots of people swear by it. It’s easy to see why. If you commonly type “mroe” for “more” it’s convenient to have the correction made automatically. With Emacs, it is, of course, easy to arrange that.
Mickey has a new post on Correcting Typos and Misspellings with Abbrev. In that post he outlines how he uses abbrev to create and maintain a list of corrections that are automatically applied as he types. In the hippie expand post he mentioned that he grabbed a list of common misspellings and typos from Wikipedia and converted it to a set of abbrev entries. In the comments to that post he was asked to expand on this and his current post is largely devoted to his explanation.
He gives a link to the Wikipedia list and then explains how he converted it to abbrev entries. You won’t be surprised to learn that the conversion involved a keyboard macro. It is, in any event, a simple process and when you’re done you have a list of words to be automatically corrected.
If you like this sort of thing, you should definitely spend a few minutes to read Mickey’s post. Abbrev mode is just one of Emacs’ expansion mechanisms but it serves an important niche for many people and is definitely worth knowing about.