Flyspell does a great job ignoring all the source code and only check comments, with one flow; it still does check the text after #includes. So the iostream here does get highlighted: #include <iostream> I tried to add the includes to the skip regions with no success: (add-to-list 'ispell-skip-region-alist '("[^#include.*$]")) Did I write it wrong? Or am I missing a different setting?