[Nix-dev] Emacs with Aspell and non-English languages

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

For those interested, I found they way to get around Emacs' annoying
"ispell and its process have different character maps", which basically
made it impossible for ispell/flyspell to spell-check accented
characters.

The root of the problem is that the Aspell dictionaries that we have in
Nixpkgs are UTF-8-encoded, while Emacs' default is Latin-1 (see
`ispell-dictionary-alist').  The following snippet fixes it:

  (setq my-utf8-aspell-dictionnaries
    "^\\(francais\\|esperanto\\|castellano\\)")

  (setq ispell-dictionary-alist
        (mapcar (lambda (dict)
                  (let ((name (car dict)))
                    (if (and (stringp name)
                             (string-match my-utf8-aspell-dictionnaries
                                           name))
                        (reverse (cons 'utf-8 (cdr (reverse dict))))
                      dict)))
                ispell-dictionary-alist))

Not sure how we could make it work "out of the box" on NixOS.

Thanks,
Ludo'.