Re: ispell and Win XP

[Michael M Mason]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 15:17:17 -0800 (PST), john doe
<m0nkeyd0g2000@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I _really_ hope someone can give me a hand with this.
>I'm trying to get ispell to work under Windows XP and
>emacs 21.2.1 but can't get it to work. I've tried
>following the directions off of the net (ex.
>http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/fmg-members/geoff/ispell-winnt.html)
>but to no avail. I'm not very techical with these
>things... should the NT 2000 instructions work with
>XP?
>
>Is there an easy way to get this to work without
>attempting to compile anything?

I've been meaning to get Ispell installed on my new XP box, and you've
prompted me to do it.  It's now working (so at least you now know that
Ispell works on XP without needing CygWin), and this is what I did:-

1) Place ispell.exe in a directory that's in your PATH (or else alter
   your PATH so the directory is included).

2) Place english.hash in your HOME directory.  Note that you MUST have
   a HOME environment variable defined: if you've defined HOME in the
   registry (which works for Emacs) Ispell won't be able to use it.

3) Don't install any ispell.el file you might have downloaded along
   with ispell.  Emacs comes with an ispell.el (in lisp/textmodes)
   which is likely to be a lot more recent than any ispell.el that
   you downloaded.

Ispell should now work -- it did for me, anyway.  I'm using version
3.1.20 but I can't remember where I got it from.

-- 
Michael