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Sorry, newbie question: I am trying to get spell checking to work in emacs on MacOSX 12.3.1

I installed emacs-plus as well as Aspell via Homebrew. I then added the following lines to my .emacs

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

I also added the code from this website that was posted in another question here.

I still get the following error message:

Error enabling Flyspell mode: (Searching for program No such file or directory ispell)

Can anyone point me to a resource on how to fix this or tell me what I am doing wrong?

Thank you!

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  • You need to install the actual spell checker aspell or hunspell or look at enchant2 to use the dictionary from macOs. IMy setup is form from macports
    – mmmmmm
    Apr 8, 2022 at 10:45
  • @mmmmmm Just to be sure I get this right: You mean it is not enough to install aspell with brew install aspell? Because that's what I have already done.
    – totti
    Apr 8, 2022 at 11:26
  • no that brew install should be OK, you might need to install the dictionary as well So what is ispell-program-name and also what does (executable-find "aspell") show - and are you on an Apple Silicon box
    – mmmmmm
    Apr 8, 2022 at 12:57
  • Yes @mmmmmm I am on Apple Silicon indeed. Is that a problem? As for executable-find, I have that in my .emacs and it just returns (Searching for program No such file or directory ispell). If Aquamacs wasn't so outdated I would probably just install that because spell checking works out of the box. At the same time, I would love to figure this out…
    – totti
    Apr 8, 2022 at 15:44
  • I agree with Aquamacs I have found too many packages that need emacs 26
    – mmmmmm
    Apr 8, 2022 at 15:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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You can probably fix this by setting ispell-program-name to the full path of aspell. Something like

(setq ispell-program-name "/path/to/aspell")
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The issue is that aspell is not on your path.

Homebrew for Apple Silicon puts things in /opt/homebrew which is not on the default path used by GUI apps. If you have altered the path in your shell startup files, as I think you have as brew works, then emacs run from the terminal would work.

The variable you need to add Homebrew's path to is exec-path, or set the variable for the spelling program to be an absolute path. There are packages that launch a shell to read the variables from it e.g. exec-path-from-shell and also code in Aquamacs.

My setup works without any changes as I use Macports for both emacs and aspell and the macports build of emacs includes the macports directory.

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