Getting Flyspell Working on Windows

Feeds:: Posts; Comments

Interesting Emacs Links – 2009 Week 17 »

Getting Flyspell Working on Windows

April 25, 2009 by Jared

From time to time I’m forced to use that other operating system and I miss the tools that I enjoy under Linux. For example, flyspell doesn’t work because there is no ispell. Fortunately it is possible to fix this by installing cygwin and ispell/cygwin.

Brian Wood wrote instructions how to set everything up back in 2006. A quick summary:

Download cygwin/ispell binaries from ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz which should be extracted from the cygwin root directory – it installs files into /usr/local/…

Add the cygwin paths to your environment. I prefer to do this at emacs start-up (my cygwin is installed in the non-standard c:/packages/cygwin)

 
(setenv "PATH" (concat (getenv "PATH")
                       ";c:\\packages\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin"
                       ";c:\\packages\\cygwin\\bin"))

Update: I’ve moved over to aspell which I found in the text section of the cygwin installer as per the comment from emacs user. Thanks.

About these ads

Posted in Emacs | Tagged cygwin, flyspell, windows emacs | 13 Comments

13 Responses

on April 26, 2009 at 02:00 emacs user

Cygwin also has ‘aspell’ (version 0.65.1) available via ‘setup.exe’. I am using that without any problems. ‘flyspell’ (M-x flyspell-mode) works without any additional set up (for me). Is there a reason to prefer ‘ispell’ over ‘aspell’?
on April 26, 2009 at 05:27 piyo

Welcome to Windows. Actually my Emacs day-to-day experience is probably 70% on Windows. Just for the record, I prefer the fork called Meadow because I input Japanese.

If you’re going to be using Cygwin with Emacs on Windows, you will need to play with the PATH. Actually, with the way you are adding to your path after %SystemRoot%, you will unforutunately pick up the Windows FIND.EXE, which will not let M-x grep-find and friends work. Other notable programs that are overshadowed are sort.exe, lpr.exe, reset.exe, expand.exe, and hostname.exe. Thus begins the %PATH_WARS%.
on April 26, 2009 at 10:00 Jared

@emacs user – hi, I was looking for ispell and came across the page I linked to first. I’ve no reason to prefer ispell (and I’ve actually switched to aspell as looks like it has obsoleted ispell).

@piyo – Er, thanks (I think) I think I get away with the find issue as unxutils is the second item in my path after emacs\bin. Good tip though, thanks.

I’ll mention Meadow to my colleagues in Tokyo (from your webpage, is Piyo from the spanish pollitos?)
on April 27, 2009 at 00:39 piyo

> I’ll mention Meadow to my colleagues in Tokyo

Meadow is installed with a Cygwin-like setup.exe. Its main strength is full integration with Microsoft Input Method Editor (MS-IME) which is important for inputing Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) text.

http://www.meadowy.org/meadow/dists/3.00/setup.exe

However its GNU Emacs version (22.1.1) lags behind other ports, but I don’t have any problem. For a succinct summary of the changes between GNU Emacs and Meadow, see this wiki page:

http://www.meadowy.org/meadow/wiki/詳細設定及び拡張機能

> (from your webpage, is Piyo from the spanish pollitos?)

No. It’s a similar concept but from a Japanese theme.
on April 27, 2009 at 21:08 Jared

However its GNU Emacs version (22.1.1) lags behind other ports, but I don’t have any problem

How are the Kanji fonts in Emacs 22 compared to properly anti-aliased applications?

> (from your webpage, is Piyo from the spanish pollitos?)

No. It’s a similar concept but from a Japanese theme.

Makes sense that chickens sound similar in all countries I guess
on April 28, 2009 at 16:19 piyo

> How are the Kanji fonts in Emacs 22 compared to properly anti-aliased applications?

Upstream Emacs 22 on Windows can show Japanese fonts, though I think it’s not anti-aliased. Meadow doesn’t add too much to this I don’t think. I think my Japanese font experience is totally non-”anti-aliased”, because I am on Windows XP and use MS Gothic and MS Mincho everywhere. These fonts are “incompatible with Microsoft’s ClearType subpixel rendering technology[citation needed]“, so perhaps they are not anti-aliased at all. In any case, Windows Vista seems to have the nicer font “Meiryo”.
on April 28, 2009 at 23:24 Jared

I’ll have to take your word for that I was just wondering if was as comparatively ugly as emacs 22 is compared to emacs 23. Sounds like for XP the answer is no as all other apps have a similar problem.
on May 30, 2009 at 21:13 LeoB

I happened to see that you are struggling with these customizations a bit and that you are perhaps also using EmacsW32. Do you know that some of these things may be customized much easier from the menu

Options – Customize EmacsW32

where you get a special page which can help you?
on May 30, 2009 at 22:39 Jared

Hi LeoB,

I’ve used the customize feature previously but I don’t think it would help with flyspell if the underlying package (aspell or ispell) was not installed. Or are you talking about something else?
on May 30, 2009 at 22:43 LeoB

Hi Jared, yes …

If you have for example aspell with cygwin installed and push the button on that page then EmacsW32 will find it and add set up the spell program in Emacs.

But you have to ask EmacsW32 to find cygwin first, a bit up on the same page. (Or you can use the big “Find All!” button.
on June 1, 2009 at 07:34 Jared

That sounds pretty neat, but I think I’m using the wrong version. I only get 6 options on that page – w32 style keys (cua-mode and rebind-keys-mode), recentf-mode (which is cool – I didn’t know about that!), w32 stye frame title, maximze new frames and simple buffer switching with C-tab.
on June 1, 2009 at 10:25 LeoB

Yes, that is the wrong version … – it is a bug that was there for a long time before someone reported it. It is fixed in the latest version. (I did not see it because it happens only the first time you use it, but if it happens it will persists…)
on June 2, 2009 at 07:27 Jared

Okay, I’ll upgrade and take a look. Thanks.