Multi lingual spell checking in mutt

[GrouchyGaijin]

I started using mutt a few days ago and found that I missed the ability of spell checking in both Swedish and English.
There are several ways to solve this problem, so you might know one that is better / easier than the solution I use.

1. You could just set an editor like abiword to be the mail editor in mutt.  In the .muttrc file add

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set editor="abiword"
I didn't want to do this, because after all, mutt runs in the terminal and using abiword (or whatever gui text editor) seems to violate the spirit of the thing. 

2. You could use vim as the editor.  I had already managed to get vim to spell check Swedish and English, so that would be the obvious choice, right?  (Shhhh I don't like vim at all - I keep forgetting the key combinations to do things, not to mention to hit the escape key before I try to move to a misspelled word.)

3. I wanted to use nano.  Why, because it is easy and runs in the terminal.

The problem is that nano comes with a terrible spell check that only tells you which words it doesn't know.  If I knew how to spell them, would they be wrong?  Aspell on the other hand, offers useful suggestions.  I wanted to use Aspell.

The problem is that Aspell didn't like loading the en_US and sv_SE dictionaries together.  I tried making a custom dictionary and that worked OK, except not in mutt.  In mutt, I'd get a spell check abnormal failure.

Then I found this bash script that let's me choose which dictionary I want to load after I invoke the spell check command.

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#!/bin/bash
read -p "Aspell: Select language: (US) SV" -s -n 1
case $REPLY in 
2|[Sv]) opts=( -l sv_SE.UTF-8 ) ;;
*) opts=( -l en_US.UTF-8 ) ;;
esac
exec aspell ${opts[@]} -e -c $1

Next I edited the nanorc file which on my system is at

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/etc/nanorc
I changed the set speller setting to point to the script

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set speller "/path/to/the/script/alpine_aspell"

Now when I hit the spell check command in nano (which my mutt uses) I get a choice: Press 1 for English or 2 for Swedish - and I'm good to go.

This worked for me.  I hope you find it useful.

[Sector11]

Hey, nice stuff GG.  I'll have to try that with English - Spanish

Thanks for this.

[GrouchyGaijin]

Hey, nice stuff GG.  I'll have to try that with English - Spanish

Thanks for this.

If you'd like to continue this email in English, press 1...

[Sector11]

[1] ... y ¿ahora?

[dizzie]

mutt, how to use email like a boss!
Well done GG