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 build on the answers by katspaugh, David Caldwell, and Ébe Isaac, and made it work with the latest versions.

Install aspell, for example with brew:

brew install aspell

brew symlinks to /usr/local/bin and you can verify the installation:

$ which aspell
/usr/local/bin/aspell

Now tell Emacs about this location, e.g. adding this line in ~/.emacs:

(setq ispell-program-name "/opt/local/bin/aspell")

Launch M-x ispell in a buffer and it works.

To install with ports, see other answers.