Error enabling flyspell in emacs - aspell MacOS

Question

I am having some difficulty getting flyspell/aspell to run on emacs 27.2, MacOS 12.01. I think I need to install or enable a dictionary, but no ideas on how to do this.

If I type 'M-x flyspell-mode' I get the following error:

Starting new Ispell process /usr/local/bin/aspell with default dictionary...done
Error enabling Flyspell mode:
(Error: No word lists can be found for the language "en_GB".)

Sounds like a dictionary is missing. I have the following in my init.el

    ;; Spell-check
(require 'flyspell)
(setq flyspell-issue-message-flag nil
      ispell-local-dictionary "en_GB"
      ispell-program-name "/usr/local/bin/aspell")

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

If I type which aspell in Terminal it returns /usr/local/bin/aspell

Answer 1

You need make sure aspell command line program is installed. If it's not installed, run brew install aspell, see https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/aspell.rb

To specify the dictionary which aspell uses,

(setq ispell-extra-args '("--lang=en_US"))

I answered lots of questions about flyspell, see https://emacs.stackexchange.com/search?q=user:202+[flyspell]

You can also read my article, http://blog.binchen.org/posts/what-s-the-best-spell-check-set-up-in-emacs/

Or uses my package wucuo (https://github.com/redguardtoo/wucuo) to replace flyspell-mode and flyspell-prog-mode.

Most people are confused on spell checking in Emacs, so let me clarify a few things,

• In good old days, people use ispell.el. These days, people use flyspell.el. flyspell does use a few APIs from ispell, but they are basically two independent packages. Setting up other ispell variables (except ispell-extra-args and ispell-program-name) might have no effect on flyspell at all.

• flyspell needs cli program to do the actual spell checking thing. The cli program could be aspell or hunspell.

• Setting up the options passed to aspell (the cli program) is straight forward. One variable ispell-extra-args is enough.

• Setting up the options passed to hunspell (the cli program) is more complicated. You can see my other answers for details.