Re: [vile] spell filter

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Paul Fox wrote:

> the spell filter has always run "spell -l" by default, because
> that's traditional.  but as far as i can tell (in a very brief
> survey), the spell command doesn't exist on either fedora or
> ubuntu.  well, there's a "spell" script on fedora that calls
> aspell, but it doesn't accept a "-l".
>
> i'm wondering if it's time to change the default program to
> something else ("ispell -l"?  "aspell list"?  what's the
> difference between aspell and ispell, anyway?), in order to
> work better out of the box?

ispell is the improved spell program (mid-90's I guess) that did 
an interactive screen.  It always had a spell compatible mode.

aspell is an improvement that provides better guesses.

aspell has a shell script that does act more/less like spell.
(Initial versions of it were definitely less, but that seemed to be
fixed a few years ago).

I made an environment variable (VILE_SPELL_FILT) to override the 
compiled-in value - mainly for win32 stuff, so I could plug in the
full pathname of the program.


--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net