Spellcheck in Emacs on OS X Mavericks with MacPorts

The MacPorts Project provides thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on a Mac. It is easy to install MacPorts.

Once MacPorts is installed, it only takes a few commands to install and upgrade software ("ports").

MacPorts support many different versions of OS X and MacOS.

Some time ago I installed MacPorts on an old MacBook Air from 2013, running OS X 10.9.5, also known as Mavericks. This results in an old laptop running an old operating system running modern software.

GNU Emacs from MacPorts

Using MacPorts I installed GNU Emacs, it installed version 30.1, which takes quite some time because it needs toe compile software from source code.

Yesterday I upgraded MacPorts and the installed software, which again resulted in a lot of compile time, and now it runs Emacs 30.2.

Emacs on an old MacBook Air

Emacs runs of course fine on an old MacBook Air.

Unfortunately, on this MacBook the function Fn-key and the Ctrl key can not be exchanged. There is only the option to turn the Caps lock key as Control key. It is best to drop the habit of using the left Control key and only use the Caps lock key for this.

Screenshot of Emacs 30.2 in X11 on OS X Mavericks

Spellcheck on Emacs

The Flyspell package takes care of spellchecking, but it needs additional software.

sudo port install hunspell hunspell-dict-nl_NL hunspell-en_US

Next, we need to tell Emacs how to use hunspell and set a default language.

Request the location of the dictionaries with hunspell -D and add these to the Emacs init file.

(setenv "DICPATH" "/opt/local/share/hunspell/")
(setenv "LANG" "en_US.UTF8")
(setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")
      (eval-after-load "ispell"
        '(progn (defun ispell-get-coding-system () 'utf-8)))

Restart Emacs or evaluate the init file.

Check spelling with Flyspell

• M-x flyspell-buffer checks the spelling of the current buffer.
• M-x flyspell-mode enables Flyspell.
• M-$$ check spelling of word-at-point.
• C-. or ESC TAB auto-corrects the word-at-point.

For many more options, see the friendly manual.

Tags: emacs mavericks old-laptop

⇽ Quickly transpose sentences and paragraphs using key bindings in Emacs

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