emacs on mac os x, how to get spell check to work

Question

I\'m moving from Windows to Mac, and I\'ve spent the whole night trying to get emacs to work.

I\'ve installed GNU emacs and simply copied over my Windows .ema

Answer 1

I use aspell from Homebrew. Simply:

brew install aspell --with-lang-en

Then, make sure your brew bin directory is in your Emacs exec-path variable. If you use /usr/local as your brew prefix then it will just work since that path is included in exec-path by default. Otherwise you'll need this somewhere in your .emacs:

  (setq exec-path (append "/path/to/brew/bin" exec-path)))

You can also accomplish the same thing using the customize interface with "M-x customize-variable RET exec-path RET" and then using the gui to add a path.

This will work on any Emacs, including the one from Emacs for Mac OS X, the one from brew, or the system Emacs.