Chris Maiorana has a useful piece of information for all Emacs users. If you’ve used Emacs at all for writing you’re doubtlessly familiar with ispell. I’m a terrible speller and absolutely couldn’t live without it. I have it set up with flyspell so that my frequent typos/misspellings are highlighted in the buffer as I make them. All it takes is a single keystroke to correct—or at least suggest a list of corrections to—the error.
You can configure various dictionaries for use with ispell but whatever you choose you will inevitably encounter correctly spelled words that are not in the dictionary. Perhaps it’s your last name, the name of your blog, or a technical term; you’re going to have it pop up as an error every time you use it.
Maiorana tells us how to have a “private dictionary” to which we can add these outliers and have them accepted by ispell. It’s a small thing, I suppose, but it’s nice to be able to write without having a bunch of errors pop up.
It’s pretty easy to set up. All you need to do is specify a file to hold your outlaw words and then add your private words to it. That’s easily done as the errors pop up. A simple keystroke adds the unknown word to your private dictionary and you never have to worry about it again.
It’s a short post and well worth a couple of minutes of your time to read if you’re tired of having special words that you use all the time pop up as errors.
Update : Added link to Maiorana’s post.