Spell Checking layer

• Buffer-wide spell checking via external command (ispell, hunspell, aspell) run through Flyspell.
• Spell as you type
• Optional correction popups, controlled by enable-flyspell-auto-completion variable.
• Auto dictionary mode for some languages.

To use this configuration layer, add it to your ~/.spacemacs. You will need to add spell-checking to the existing dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in this file.

The built-in Emacs variable that controls which external spell-checking program is used is ispell-program-name, which can be set in your dotspacemacs/user-init function if you do not like the default. It will give priority to aspell if it is installed on your system. Another important variable to be aware of is ispell-dictionary which will control the default dictionary used by ispell-program-name (instead of using this variable you can also use the key binding SPC S d).

By default, spell-checking is enabled in all available major modes and may be toggled off with SPC t S. You can default this to off by setting the variable spell-checking-enable-by-default to nil:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((spell-checking :variables spell-checking-enable-by-default nil)))

auto-dictionary-mode tries to detect the current language from the buffer content, and activate the corresponding dictionary. You can enable it by setting the variable spell-checking-enable-auto-dictionary to something other than nil:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((spell-checking :variables spell-checking-enable-auto-dictionary t)))

Some people encountered bugs with auto-dictionary-mode, especially in daemon mode where new emacsclient open directly freezed. If so, no other workaround have been found yet than disabling auto-dictionary-mode completely.

Not all languages are supported by auto-dictionary-mode. The supported languages are listed in the adict-language-list variable, that can be checked with spacemacs/describe-variable. For convenience, here is the list of currently supported language:

If your language is not supported by auto-dictionary feature or you author multi-lingual documents you might be compelled to use hunspell's multi-dictionary mode. For example to enable it for pl_PL and en_GB dictionaries you could put following code in your dotspacemacs/user-config section in your configuration file:

(with-eval-after-load "ispell"
    (setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")
    ;; ispell-set-spellchecker-params has to be called
    ;; before ispell-hunspell-add-multi-dic will work
    (ispell-set-spellchecker-params)
    (ispell-hunspell-add-multi-dic "pl_PL,en_GB")
    (setq ispell-dictionary "pl_PL,en_GB"))

One caveat is you need quite modern ispell.el for above to work. It's been tested with version coming from Emacs 25.2 repository.

To enable auto-completion popup when the point is idle on a misspelled word set the layer variable enable-flyspell-auto-completion to t:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((spell-checking :variables enable-flyspell-auto-completion t)))