As I posted yesterday, it turns out that I have some old 32 bit software left over from Fink installs on my machines. As far as I know, none of it was being used except for Ispell. Once I got rid of the /sw subdirectory, I needed a new version of Ispell for Emacs. As long as I was changing things I also looked at Aspell and compared their features. No doubt about it, Aspell is superior but Ispell had one advantage: it has a filter that allows it to work with nroff files. Because I do a lot of writing using Troff, this was important to me so I decided to just update Ispell.
That turned out to be harder than I thought. Despite having a configuration file for OS X, it wouldn’t even compile on my machine. I played around with it a little until I decided that I was just wasting my time and that Aspell probably made more sense anyway. Unlike Ispell, the Aspell installation was a snap.
First go to the Aspell site and download the latest version by clicking on the “latest version” link. Then click on the “available dictionaries” link to choose a dictionary. I put both of these in ~/tars/, which is where all my tars live, and then unpacked them into ~/tools/ with
cd ~/tools
tar -xvzf ../tars/aspell-0.60.6.1.tar.gz
tar -xvjf ../tars/aspell6-en-7.1-0.tar.bz2
next I built Aspell with
./configure make sudo make install
The last line will install Aspell in /usr/local/bin. You can also copy the Ispell and Spell emulation scripts, if you want them, with
sudo cp scripts/ispell /usr/local/bin sudo cp scripts/spell /usr/local/bin
Finally I installed the dictionary with
./configure make sudo make install
At this point I had a working Aspell. The last step was to tell Emacs to use Aspell, which I did with
(setq ispell-program-name "/usr/local/bin/aspell")
Then I restarted Emacs and was up and running again.
So far, I really like Aspell. It is much better at suggesting alternatives for misspelled words and seems every bit as speedy as Ispell. If you’re still using Ispell for hysterical raisins you might want to give Aspell a try instead. I think you’ll like it.