Prefix Portage v. Aquamacs v. aspell
I come from a heavy Gentoo background in GNU/Linux land, so on OS X, I prefer Prefix Portage. YMMV, but I think it’s a great environment. I mainly use it to install the few extra UNIX utilities that don’t ship with OS X.
Wanting to get spell checking working, I read the Emacs Wiki, and thought all I had to do was install aspell. I even added my prefix portage paths to my Preferences.el file:
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(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Library/Gentoo/bin" path-separator (getenv "PATH")))
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(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Library/Gentoo/sbin" path-separator (getenv "PATH")))
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(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Library/Gentoo/usr/bin" path-separator (getenv "PATH")))
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(setenv "PATH" (concat "/Library/Gentoo/usr/sbin" path-separator (getenv "PATH")))
While the above did change my path, it didn’t make spellcheck work. The following code did:
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;; spelling
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(eval-after-load "ispell"
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(progn
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(setq ispell-dictionary "en"
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ispell-silently-savep t)))
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(setq-default ispell-program-name "/Library/Gentoo/usr/bin/aspell")
The peculiar thing is that I had to specify the full path to aspell, and not just “aspell” with the above PATH additions. Very strange; I’m no Lisp programmer (yet!), so any suggestions would be appreciated.