Checking a single word

The simplest emacs command for calling ispell is 'M-$' (meta-dollar. On some terminals, you must type ESC-$.) This checks the spelling of the word under the cursor. If the word is found in the dictionary, then a message is printed in the echo area. Otherwise, ISPELL attempts to generate near misses.

If any near misses are found, they are displayed in a separate window, each preceded by a digit or character. If one of these is the word you wanted, just type its digit or character, and it will replace the original word in your buffer.

If no near miss is right, or if none are displayed, you have five choices:

I

Insert the word in your private dictionary. Use this if you know that the word is spelled correctly.

A

Accept the word for the duration of this editing session, but do not put it in your private dictionary. Use this if you are not sure about the spelling of the word, but you do not want to look it up immediately, or for terms that appear in your document but are not truly words. The next time you start ispell, it will have forgotten any accepted words.

SPC

Leave the word alone, and consider it misspelled if it is checked again.

R

Replace the word. This command prompts you for a string in the minibuffer. You may type more than one word, and each word you type is checked again, possibly finding other near misses. This command provides a handy way to close in on a word that you have no idea how to spell. You can keep trying different spellings until you find one that is close enough to get a near miss.

L

Lookup. Display words from the dictionary that contain a specified substring. The substring is a regular expression, which means it can contain special characters to be more selective about which words get displayed. See section `Regexps' in emacs. If the only special character in the regular expression is a leading ^, then a very fast binary search will be used, instead of scanning the whole file. Only a few matching words can be displayed in the ISPELL window. If you want to see more, use the look program directly from the shell.

Of course, you can also type ^G to stop the command without changing anything.

If you make a change that you don't like, just use emacs' normal undo feature See section `undo' in emacs.

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