Irreal

As I’ve written recently [1, 2, 3, 4], I’ve been changing the Irreal Bunker’s spelling corrector to Jinx. I’ve had a couple of issues—mostly with choosing the correction—but things have mostly been smooth and Jinx has a lot of nice features.

One thing I don’t like is the face that Jinx chooses for misspelled words. Ispell used red, which stood out and made it easy to pick out the misspellings. Jinx uses a color that is almost the same as the text and even though misspellings are underlined with a wavy line they’re harder to pick out. There are two colors: one for dark themes and one for light themes. Oddly, there are no options for changing the colors.

Happily, this is Emacs so the source code is only a click away. It turns out the color is defined by a defface in the jinx.el file. I copied that to my init.el and changed the color to red Here’s the result:

(defface jinx-misspelled
  '((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)
      (supports :underline (:style wave)))
     :underline (:style wave :color "#d2b580"))
    (((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)
      (supports :underline (:style wave)))
     :underline (:style wave :color "#ff0000")) ; <-- changed color
    (t :underline t :inherit error))
  "Face used for misspelled words.")

I was going to change the color for the dark theme too just for completeness but the Minions wouldn’t allow it. You know how they are about dark themes. If you want to change the color in your Emacs, just paste the above into your init.el and choose whichever color works for you. You can, of course, also fix things up for dark themes. Just don’t tell the Minions.

Some time ago, I installed Embark but I never got around to learning it and it has sat unused ever since. Then I saw this post by Bozhidar Batsov and decided to take another look. The problem with Embark is that it’s hard to understand and the documentation is long and complex. Too long, I discovered, to read and understand in one sitting.

I approached the problem by reading a section at a time and trying out examples in my Emacs. Even so, it still took some experimentation to completely figure things out. The process is ongoing but I’m making progress.

All of the above sounds pretty negative but I actually think Embark is a real win. Once you figure things out it’s really useful. For example, one of the things I’ve never been able to get working reliably is following a link in an arbitrary buffer to its target. Embark does that easily and if you use embark-dwim it’s a single keystroke. I use Hyper+. for embark-act and Hyper+, for embark-dwim. I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s very easy to invoke either of those commands.

Batsov is all in on Embark. He and I often share preferences and this is an example of that. The more I find out about Embark, the more I like it. The commands that work on a group of files can be difficult to grok but once you do they’re very powerful. I’ve resigned myself that learning Embark is an ongoing process but I think it’s worth it.

Yesterday I wrote that I had reconsidered my stance on Jinx and decided to give it a serious try. The only problem I had was that picking the correct spelling wasn’t working as advertised. I speculated that this was probably the result of some interaction between Jinx and Ivy and this, indeed, turned out to be the case.

Embarrassingly, mbork had already pointed this out in his post about Jinx that I linked to but since I wasn’t planning on installing Jinx, I hadn’t paid it much attention. His solution was simple: he merely disabled Ivy for Jinx by advising jinx-correct. That works fine but I’m not sure that I like that behavior either. You have to press Tab to get the list corrections and then it isn’t any easier choose the right one.

I’m sure there’s something simple that I’m missing so I’ll continue experimenting or perhaps one of Irreal’s more knowledgeable readers will tell me I’m just being stupid. In any event, I’m going back to the original behavior until I can figure out the correct way of fixing things.

In a stunning case of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve been running across the Jinx spelling corrector everywhere. I had never heard of it until last week when I watched and wrote about Prot’s video on writing in foreign languages with Emacs. Then Marcin Borkowski wrote about it and I posted about that. In all those instances, I concluded that Jinx was interesting but mainly of use for those who regularly wrote in more than one language. Since I seldom do that, I decided I was going to stick with flyspell.

Then Omar commented on my Borkowski post saying that Jinx was a better solution than flyspell even if you used it with only one language. I thought that perhaps I should reconsider my decision about sticking with flyspell. Finally, I saw this post by Bozhidar Batsov on why he has recently switched from flyspell to Jinx and became convinced that I should give it a try.

I installed it without difficulty and am writing this post with it as a sort of maiden voyage. So far, everything seems fine. By default, jinx-correct is bound to Meta+$, which I find a little clumsy so I changed that to Ctrl+;, which is where my muscle memory thinks it should be.

The only problem I’ve had is quickly choosing the correction. The documentation says that you can do that put typing the number of the correction but that simply exits the correction leaving the old spelling in place. The problem may be some interaction with Ivy, which I’ll investigate as soon as I get some time.

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on the Jinx spell corrector. Mbork has tried fly-spell but found it too laggy for his purposes. That was back in the days when he had a Pentium class machine running at 100 Mhz so he thought, in view of his more modern hardware, that it was worth trying out fly-spell again.

He still found it too slow and decided to try Jinx instead. I’ve always found fly-spell snappy and I hadn’t heard of Jinx until I read Prot’s post on writing (and spell correcting) foreign languages in Emacs but mbork wasn’t satisfied until he tried Jinx. He found that it was fast enough for his use cases and decided to embrace it as his spell corrector.

He discovered that Jinx interfered with some of his work flows but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix those. You can check out mbork’s post for the details.

If you are writing in multiple languages with Emacs, then Jinx may be an excellent solution as a spell checker. If, like me, you mostly write in your native tongue, you’ll probably find fly-spell is all you need. As I said above, it’s more than fast enough for me and provides a wonderfully interactive spell correction system.