Hunspell for Emacs in OSX

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System Environments

Operating Systems

• Main- : OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
• Sub- : Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy (7.8)
• Server: Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy || Squeeze
• Mobile: iOS 7.1.2

Table of Contents

• System Environments
  • Operating Systems
• Hunspell and Emacs under OSX
  • Instruction for Hunspell in Emacs Cocoa with English-Korean under OSX
  • Toggle libraries

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Hunspell and Emacs under OSX

Hunspall is one of the famous spell-checker softwares and GNU licensed. However, it is tricky to use it. Furthermore, the latest Emacs porks provided not only by Emacs Cocoa, but also by MacPorts and all Aquamacs can not be applicable to Hunspell as long as I have tried. Frankly speaking, the only way I know how to make Hunspell work in Emacs is the Emacs Cocoa 24.3.¹ Installation of hunspell is done by means of MacPorts. Note that a English-Korean multilingual environment is taken in this post as an example.

• Requirements:
  • MacPorts for OSX Yosemite
  • Emacs Cocoa 24.3: Homepage or "direct download"

Additionally, dictionary-toggling in Emacs will be at issue of this post as well.

Instruction for Hunspell in Emacs Cocoa with English-Korean under OSX

1. It assumed that MacPorts were already installed, so that ready to use.
2. Install Hunspell and its English library via MacPorts

   $ sudo port install hunspell hunspell-dict-en_US
   

3. See paths for hunspell and hunspell-dict-en_US by running

   $ hunspell -D
   

   They must be /opt/local/bin/hunspell and /opt/local/share/hunspell/en_US.

4. Download Hunspell dictionary for Korean: Homepage, download page, or "direct download"
5. After unzipped ko-aff-dic-0.5.6.zip, locate two files ko.aff and ko.dic into ~/Library/Spelling/.
6. Open the Emacs preference file ~/.emacs and add library-information as the following elisp

   (setq ispell-local-dictionary-alist
   '(
     ("english-hunspell"
      "[A-Za-z]" "[^A-Za-z]" "[0-9a-zA-Z]" t
      ("-d" "/opt/local/share/hunspell/en_US")   ;; <--- exact path
      nil utf-8)
     ("korean-hunspell"
      ;; "[가-힝]" "[^가-힝]" "[0-9a-zA-Z]" nil   ;; <--- emacs 22이하
      "[가-힣]" "[^가-힣]" "[0-9a-zA-Z]" nil   ;; <--- emacs 23이상
      ("-d" "/Users/JOHN/Library/Spelling/ko")   ;; <--- JOHN indicates you in OSX
      nil utf-8)
     ;; ("german-hunspell"
     ;;  "[a-zäöüßA-ZÄÖÜ]" "[^a-zäöüßA-ZÄÖÜ]" "[']" t
     ;;  ("-d" "de_DE")
     ;;  nil utf-8)
     )
   )
   

   Remember that a) you have to use exact paths ,not like ~ for your home directory and b) JOHN above must be replaced by your name in OSX. FYI) If you wanna use a triple lingual environment such as German together, you can uncomment the last four sentences and modify a library.

7. And put the Hunspell information

   (setq ispell-program-name "/opt/local/bin/hunspell"   ;; <--- exact path in OSX 10.10
         ispell-dictionary "english-hunspell")
   (setq ispell-really-hunspell t)   ;; <--- optional??? working w/o it in emacs(cocoa)
   

Toggle libraries

It must be great to change libraries with a keyboard stroke, like ^\ (C-\ in typical Emacs notation) for toggle-input-method rather than type it after ⌥x (M-x in typical Emacs notation). I set the toggle for libraries by ⇧SPC (S-SPC in typical Emacs notation). Add the following into ~/.emacs

;; ### korean-english
(let ((langs '("korean-hunspell" "english-hunspell")))
  (setq lang-ring (make-ring (length langs)))
  (dolist (elem langs) (ring-insert lang-ring elem)))
(defun cycle-ispell-languages ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((lang (ring-ref lang-ring -1)))
    (ring-insert lang-ring lang)
    (ispell-change-dictionary lang)))
;; ### key bindings
(global-set-key (kbd "S-SPC") 'cycle-ispell-languages)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Footnotes:

¹

Exact version of the Emacs Cocoa working with Hunspell is 24.3.1. Other versions I have tested are 24.5-1, 24.4, and 23.4, which all I failed to use smoothly.

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Created: 2015-05-30 Sat 21:01

Emacs 24.3.1 (Org mode 8.2.10)