Emacs Spelling

Two spellcheckers for Linux: ispell and it's GNU replacement, aspell. Aspell seems to be the better of the two.

flyspell is an Emacs mode which higlights badly spelled words in the fly. You can turn it on manually by doing a M-x flyspell-mode or you can put this in your .emacs file:

;; for all text modes
;; auto-fill mode means that lines are broken automatically when they
;; become too long.
;; flyspell-mode highlights badly spelled words on the fly
(defun my-text-mode-hook ()
  (auto-fill-mode t)
  (flyspell-mode t)
)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'my-text-mode-hook)

(defun my-message-mode-hook ()
  (auto-fill-mode 'nil)
  (flyspell-mode t)
)
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook 'my-message-mode-hook)

;; try to speed flyspell up a bit
(setq flyspell-issue-message-flag nil)
(setq flyspell-issue-welcome-flag nil)

Run this:

M-x flyspell-buffer

To re-run flyspell on the whole buffer if the markings are out of date.

The key combo: M-$ (ispell-word) will give suggestions for the misspelled word.