Spellcheck With Emacs on Termux

I’m using Emacs on Termux to blog with on my phone and realised that, by default, spellcheck doesn’t work. M-x ispell (Altx ispell) fails with the error “Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell”.

After investigating a bit, it turns out that neither ispell or aspell are available as packages for Termux. Instead, they’re concentrating their efforts on supporting hunspell.

To get spellcheck working under Emacs with hunspell:

1. Install the hunspell package

   pkg install hunspell

2. Add the following to your Emacs configuration:

   (setq ispell-program-name (executable-find "hunspell"))

3. Restart Emacs.

That should get you a spell checker in Emacs.