Contents

About

This plugin checks the content of the current document in Geany with the spell check library Enchant. You can also select a certain text passage, then the plugin will only check the selected text. All lines with misspelled words are highlighted with a red squiggly underline and the wrong words are printed in the messages window at the bottom of Geany together with available suggestions. For the plugin to work at all, you need to have the Enchant library installed together with at least one backend (Aspell, Myspell, Hunspell, ...). The plugin's configure dialog lists all available languages/dictionaries which can be used for the spell check.

Features

Usage

Install the plugin (https://plugins.geany.org/install.html) then load it in Geany's plugin manager. A new menu item in the Tools menu will appear. Alternatively, you can assign a keyboard shortcut in Geany's preferences dialog to perform a spell check.

Configuring custom dictionaries

Especially on Windows, you might need to install the dictionaries (the files containing the information for spell checking) manually. First, you need to download the dictionary files for the languages you want, e.g. from https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/tree/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/. The downloaded archives should contain one or more .dic and .aff files.

Instructions:

  1. Download the archive you want to use
  2. The downloaded archive with extensions like .xpi or .oxt is actually a ZIP archive, so extract it as usual (e.g. with 7-Zip or another ZIP unpacker). Extract the contents into a folder of your choice, e.g. C:\dictionaries
  3. If the extracted dictionary files contain hyphens ("-"), replace them with underscores
  4. Then open to the Spell Check plugin preferences dialog in Geany and choose the folder you just created. You may need to restart Geany and then the installed dictionaries should be available

Note: if you are using Enchant 2.0 or later (the library used by the SpellCheck plugin), you need to move the dictionaries into a subfolder called "hunspell" in the directory you created above. The directory to be configured in the plugin's configuration dialog still is the directory above that folder. To check which Enchant version you are using, check "Help->Debug Messages" in Geany and find the appropriate log message telling about the Enchant version.

Example: 

C:\
├── dictionaries
│    └── hunspell
│            ├── ca_ES.aff
│            ├── ca_ES.dic
│            ├── cs.dic
│            ├── cs.dic
│            ├── de_DE_frami.aff
│            ├── de_DE_frami.dic
│            ├── en_GB.aff
│            └── en_GB.dic
└── ...

Then in the plugin configuration dialog set the dictionary for dictionary files to: C:\dictionaries.

Maintaining personal dictionaries

When you manually add words to your personal dictionary (using the "Add <word> to Dictionary" menu item), those words are stored in a personal dictionary per language. If you want to add, modify or remove words from these dictionaries, you need to open the dictionaries with an editor like Geany and edit them. As far as we know, there is no graphical tool to edit those files. However, they are plain text files with one word per line.

These files are usually located in: /home/<username>/.config/enchant/<LANG>.dic. The exact storage location might differ between operating systems.

Additional informationcan be found on https://github.com/AbiWord/enchant, section "Sharing personal word lists between spell-checkers".

Known issues

Requirements

Ideas, questions, patches and bug reports

Send it to me at enrico(dot)troeger(at)uvena(dot)de or report them at https://github.com/geany/geany-plugins/issues.

Docs for previous versions