Spell checking in irssi

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Michael Schurter

irssi is the client of the future and the only real option if you use IRC.

However, one feature I always wished it had was spell-checking. Turns out with about 30 seconds worth of work (including googling), you can have it!

First on a Debian (probably works on Ubuntu too) system, install Lingua::Ispell and Ispell using the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install ispell liblingua-ispell-perl

It should pull in a number of other packages including a dictionary. I actually received an error as well, but it seems safe to ignore:


error in control file: `Index' value missing for format `info' at /usr/sbin/install-docs line 709, line 16.

Next up download the irssi spell script:

$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts/
$ wget http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/spell.pl
$ # Reattach to your irssi screen session now...
$ screen -rAad irssi

Finally…

  1. Load the script into irssi
  2. bind Alt-s as the shortcut to spell-check your current line*
  3. tell the script to give you more than the default of 1 guess

…by running the following commands in irssi:

/script load spell.pl
/bind meta-s /_spellcheck
/set spell_max_guesses 3

And you’re done! Now when you press Alt-s, irssi spell checks your current line and gives you spelling suggestions in the current window.

* I highlighted this part because the irssi scripts page doesn’t mention it. You have to view the documentation at the top of the script file to find out that you have to manually bind the shortcut key.

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  • Spellcheck kick

    Hi,

    I’m looking into creating a bot to spellcheck content in a chanel.
    Thusfar I have the bash cmdline and would like to add this as a script to a irc client.

    Would you perhaps know of a irc client that has the ability to run bash scripts.

    The end results would count the words that are typed by users of a channel , that does not exits in a dictionary. Perhaps later write suggestions back to channel as well.

    Thanks

  • jones

    I’ve spent about 30 minutes looking, but no matter what I try, this script never returns any spelling errors. Do you have any idea what is going on here?

  • Anonymous

    Very good. And to add new words?