Date:	Tue, 13 Oct 1998 19:21:36 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
cc:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Built-in spell-checking in Emacs
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.981013191459.4278u-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

I got too annoyed to not be able to spell-check from within Emacs, so I 
made it happen.

No, it's not the ultimate solution (to get Emacs to support async 
subprocesses)--that project is still on the todo list.  Rather, I used a 
stupid but effective kludge that reinvokes Ispell each time Emacs wants 
to pass it another chunk of text, but in a way that is smart enough to 
preserve Ispell's state between invocations.  It's a bit slow, but in my 
P166 and with TMPDIR pointing to a RAM disk it is tolerable.

Flyspell (the new feature of Emacs 20 that spell-checks as you type) also 
works, but is even slower (as it submits single words to Ispell).

So, if you use Emacs 20.3 and want this feature, mail me privately and I 
will send you a patch for ispell.el.  If you use 19.34, you will have to 
tweak it by hand, but it shouldn't be difficult, either.

- Raw text -