ISPELL-WRAPPER(1)

✨ ISPELL-WRAPPER ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to ispell-wrapper(1) — the smart wrapper for ispell 💅 this is the page for the ispell-wrapper manual, and it's genuinely so helpful, i promise.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

ispell-wrapper — a smart wrapper for ispell 🧚

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

ispell-wrapper [--emacs=name] [--language=regexp] [--dry-run] [ispell options] file

Options (and yes, all of them are long-only options, no lil short flags here):

• --emacs=name — Set the language to use by emacs dict name
• --language=regexp — Set the language to use by name
• --dry-run — Only show what would have done

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

ispell-wrapper is a wrapper script for ispell that's meant to be used on a Debian system, hanging out with the infrastructure that the dictionaries-common package introduced. Option --dry-run will show the string to be run without doing anything else. like, it just tells you the vibe, it doesn't actually do the thing 🫶

It automatically sets the -d, -w, and -T options to ispell as a function of the chosen language. and of course, this only works for dictionary packages that comply with the above mentioned Policy — no cap, that's the deal.

Here's how the language gets defined, in order of priority 👑

1. By matching the emacs dict name given in --emacs option to the name of one of the emacs dicts names provided by installed languages in the system. This match must be exact (although is case insensitive). Note that this will override any value given in the --language option. 💀
2. By matching the regexp given in option --language to the list of installed languages in the system.
3. By matching the regexp stored in the environment variable ISPELLDEFAULT to the list of installed languages in the system.
4. By using the value stored in the user-specific file ~/.ispell-default (use select-default-iwrap(1) to set it).
5. By using the value stored in the site-wide file /etc/dictionaries-common/ispell-default (use select-default-ispell(8) as superuser to set it).

Note: regexp matches are case-insensitive and the ISO-8859-1 special characters are transformed into their ASCII equivalents. German ess-zet is equivalent to the character "s" and the ae ligature to the character "e". 🦋

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🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

ok so let's say the following dictionaries are installed in the system (as appearing in the Debconf question at installation time):

castellano (Spanish TeX mode)
castellano8 (Spanish 8 bit)
português (European Portuguese)
português brasileiro (Brazilian Portuguese)

Choosing the regexp (either in the --language option or in the environment variable ISPELLDEFAULT) to be "span" will yield an error, since two languages will match ("castellano" and "castellano8"). 😭

However, if the regexp is "span.*8", the language "castellano8 (Spanish 8 bit)" will be chosen. slay ✨

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

• ISPELLDEFAULT — Regexp that matches the name of the default language to use, if no --language option is given.

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💜 FILES 💜

• $HOME/.ispell-default — Contains the name of the language to use, if no --language option is given or if the ISPELLDEFAULT environment variable is not set. This is an user-specific choice.
• /etc/dictionaries-common/ispell-default — Name of the language to use when everything above is not set. This is a system-wide setting.

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

select-default-ispell(8), select-default-iwrap(1)

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Rafael Laboissiere

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this is version 1.31.4, dated 2026-3-22, from the ISPELL-WRAPPER(1) manual** 🎀 ty for reading, ily, go spell some words 💖✨