Re: [Help-nano] Spell Checker Under Windows: Please Help

[John Goche]

 

Thank you for your reply,

 

I will consider your suggestions.

 

Interesting about the existence of PDCurses:

http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net/

 

I didn't know it existed.

 

Regards,

 

John Goche

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Chris Allegretta <address@hidden> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 9:16 AM, John Goche<address@hidden> wrote:
> Thank you for your contribution to this discussion.
> It would be nice indeed if there were a text speller
> which could be used instead of ispell. However,
> fist of all nano should have a screen where you
> can tell nano which program to use to carry out
> the text spelling, whether ispell or some other
> program. Second, it appears to me that if another
> spell checker is used instead of ispell, than it must
> support the same command line interface in order
> to be compatible with nano.

I agree on the second point, which is why I suggested using a full
unix-like environment like cygwin; nano is a unix program and thus
expects other unix programs to provide the functionality that it does
not provide.   Nano lets you specify an alternate spell program in the
traditional unix way: via the command line. You're not going to get
away from the fact that nano is built for Unix, so I suggested
embracing that fact.

I'm not interested in bundling ispell, or spell, or even just
/usr/shard/dict/words into nano just for the sake of win32; I may as
well just bundle all of cygwin up and call that the nano win32
version.  Except cygwin already does that so I'd just be duplicating
effort.  Let me know if you are aware of a win32-native spell check
programs that provide a list of misspelled words on stdout when they
exit and I'll consider adding support for them into the nano win32
binary.  If you're volunteering to contribute other fixes to the win32
distribution I welcome the patches.

> As a curiosity, assuming the name "ispell" is
> included into nano and the fork() system call
> is used to launch it, where does nano look
> for ispell in terms of the absolute path to
> the spell checker?

See above, probably the windows system PATH environment variable.

> Also, as an aside, does anyone know whether
> the nano screen interface for window is also
> compiled with GNU ncurses just like the
> Linux counterpart?

No, nano is built with PDCurses.(see the README.TXT that comes with the binary).

>
> Thanks,
>
> John Goche
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Eitan Adler <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps there is already a spell checker for windows that serves a
>> similar purpose?
>>
>> --
>> Eitan Adler
>> "Security is increased by designing for the way humans actually behave."
>> -Jakob Nielsen
>
>

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