I think I just started Emacs at the right time!

General
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Hi everyone,

For the summer I decided to learn something new, and that thing happened to be emacs. I’ve finished the Absolute Guide as well as the in-program tutorial and I’m quite impressed with the functionality on display. Being able to copy large sections of text without having to stick my index finger on the left click button is amazing! And it seems that I started at just the right time to find this Forum. Glad to be here!

P.S: What’s the best spell-checker for daily use? Any chance I can get Grammarly to work in here? I’m also on the lookout for a package that can work with the TV Tropes Markup format.

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Welcome to Emacsland. It is truly the “editor of a lifetime” (being more of a platform or Lisp Machine than an editor).

flyspell is built-in, but the jinx package is by a prolific author and I’ve heard many good things about it.

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Welcome TriAttack.

Glad to know that you are trying Emacs. It is worthy.
As to spell-check, I use Aspell. However, it does not support much grammar. Maybe you can add?

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How do I get aspell on Windows 11? I’ve tried using Hunspell, but there’s actually an open bug on the current version that break Emacs compatibility.

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Sounds interesting! How do I get it to work correctly on Windows 11? I’m specifically trying to figure out how to get enchant on my device.

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Not that there aren’t any Windows users around here, but asking for help with Windows 11 is kind of like barking up the wrong tree here. :wink:

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Well, it’s worth asking regardless. Linux is slowly getting closer to being a viable option for me, but there are just some awfully nagging sticky points, like how most everything seems to have a default windows version but no Linux port, like Solidworks. Or how font sizes just seem slightly off. I do have an old Thinkpad running Linux Mint though.

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Welcome @TriAttack,

With my professional laptop currently under windows10, I installed aspell from MSYS2. There is a mingw64 repository.

pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-aspell
pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-aspell-en
pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-aspell-fr

Then you need to setup your Emacs config file:

;; aspell must be in your PATH
(setq ispell-program-name “aspell”)
;; dictionnary at startup
(setq ispell-dictionary “english”)

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I like this idiomatic expression and push it to my org notes by the way. :rofl:

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Does this require using emacs installed by msys?

Edit: it works! Emacs can automatically find aspell

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Well, I certainly can’t take credit for that one. I suppose a more contemporary one would be, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” but I didn’t make that one up either. :wink:

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I have seen that you made it work. Congratulations.

Alternatively, you can try wsl if you use Windows anyway.

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This one was too subtle for me to catch. Thanks to google for helping me to find the reference about Wendy’s restaurant.

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Regarding the question about grammarly, yes, there are a few packages available. Check MELPA for flycheck-grammarly, flymake-grammarly, and also grammarly. Also there is this project GitHub - emacs-grammarly/eglot-grammarly: Eglot Clients for Grammarly to get a grammarly language server for eglot.

Hope that helps.

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Thank you, I’ll try it out one day.

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If you haven’t, read Bob’s An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp.

(copying and pasting from this reply)

Bob’s An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp is great. Didn’t finish it, but it gave me a lot. It comes packaged under GNU Emacs and is available to read in:

  1. The Info command $ info eintr or
  2. under GNU Emacs: C-h R eintr RET (by default C-h R runs the info-display-manual command, which asks you for the name of the manual. The command can also be run with M-x info-display-manual RET eintr RET) or
  3. The GNU site https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eintr/
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I use emacs with wsl (Ubuntu) on windows. That is the best experience in my opinion on windows

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Thank you for the recommendation! I’ve been thinking of making a package one day, so this could be very useful.

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You can use scoop to install Emacs and aspell. I have not tried it, but there are scoop packages for both.

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Yep, it’s how I get Emacs and aspell on MS Windows on the rare occasions I have to use that OS.