Re: [Nano-devel] spell check

[David Lawrence Ramsey]

Ken Tyler wrote:
>
> nano 1.3.7
>
> if spell check is run on an unmodified file and finds no errors it
> says "Modified" in the status bar and offers up save menu when
> exiting.
>
> I have
>     set speller "ispell"
> in .nanorc

The short of it is that it doesn't seem to be worth it in terms of
effort to determine whether a file run through the alternate spell
checker has changed or not.  For the same reason, replacing all
instances of a string with itself will still set the "Modified" flag.

This is not to say that I haven't thought about it, but getting, say,
MD5 sums or SHA1 sums of the files before and after spell checking seems
like overkill if it's added to nano (and will make it less portable,
since methods like them depend on numbers' having particular bit widths,
and there's no clean way to ensure that and still remain completely
compatible with C89), and introduces another unnecessary dependency on
an external program if it isn't added to nano.  And doing a straight
comparison of both files will take even longer, and make things more
complicated in a different way.

Of course, I'm open to suggestions (or patches) if you have any ideas as
to how to do it well.  Thanks for the report, in any case.