Make ispell automatically clear minibuffer when replacing word

Question

When using ispell to check spelling and encountering an incorrect word, pressing r takes you to the minibuffer where you can enter a replacement for the misspelled word. By default the minibuffer already contains the incorrectly spelled word and so I need to clear the minibuffer first before being able to type in the replacement.

How do I add a hook to clear the input prompt automatically?

Answer 1

Honestly, I don't know if this is a good way to solve this issue, but it works (though fragile) and it shows a method that is applicable in other case.

Test case (since the Young Grandfather (tYG) forgot to post one):

(with-temp-buffer
  (setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")
  (switch-to-buffer (current-buffer))
  (insert "speling")
  (ispell-word))

You see what tYG talks about by evaluating and clicking r. (Leave out the hunspell part if that's better for you).

Since ispell-command-loop is very complicated, it's not easy to mess with its internals. But we can use a fragile advice around it, see (info "(elisp) Advising Functions"). Note that we are using Stefan Monnier's new, hip and super-nice nadvice.el package!

(defun rasmus/ispell-loop-get-rid-of-misspeled-word (orig-fun &rest args)
  "Around-advice to avoid the misspeled word when typing r in ispell."
  (require 'cl)
  (cl-letf* (((symbol-function #'read-string*) (symbol-function #'read-string))
     ((symbol-function #'read-string)
      (lambda (prompt &optional initial-input history default-value
             inherit-input-method)
        (if (equal prompt "Replacement for: ")
        (read-string* prompt)
          (read-string* prompt initial-input history default-value
                inherit-input-method)))))
(apply orig-fun args)))

(advice-add 'ispell-command-loop :around
    #'rasmus/ispell-loop-get-rid-of-misspeled-word)

Run the test again. The misspelled word should be gone.

Bonus: do C-h f ispell-command-loop C-j. It should contain a line like :around advice: `rasmus/ispell-loop-get-rid-of-misspeled-word'.

Answer 2

@rasmus provided a nice programmatic solution. Here's another solution that is more interactive - it emulates what you manually do to clear the minibuffer when it's displayed with initial input:

(add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook
          (lambda ()
            (when (equal (minibuffer-prompt) "Replacement for: ")
              (delete-minibuffer-contents))))