A Day in the Life

So, I'm wrestling with my antique version of Emacs yesterday. Actually, it would be better to call it my classic version. It's still my favorite program for text manipulation, from heavy-duty file cleaning with advanced macros, to quick and dirty first drafts.

The only complaint I have with my version is that, unlike every other incarnation of Emacs that I've used, the spell checker doesn't work. And cutting and pasting my work into another program just to check for typos has always been a low-level annoyance for me, but I have always put up with it.

Until yesterday, that is.

Since the dawn of dumb terminals and the first PCs, managerial types at companies have fretted about "fritter factor." Fritter factor is the amount of time burned tweaking your settings so that your desktop looks cleaner, your programs run better, what have you, when you should be doing something else.

As it happens, Emacs traditionally runs spell checking by launching an external program, and that program has traditionally been Ispell. Now, the gurus who hack on the Emacs program and its related helper programs have never been at all tolerant of products from Redmond. But there have been a few madmen kind souls out there who have built versions of Emacs that run on a PC, and others who have done the same for Ispell. These efforts seem to have peaked in the mid-1990s, when these few hardy souls got lives finished their graduate degrees went on to other things.

Anyway, I got it in my head yesterday morning that, by gum, I was going to get Ispell working with my version of Emacs on my PC. And sure enough, seven hours later, I did. Of course, I being me, I then frittered away another three hours writing up my notes from that experience. I'll post these notes as soon as I finish proofreading them. (For whom will these notes prove useful? Epitome of a rhetorical question.)

One funny thing that I came across while thrashing around: part of what I used to make Ispell work I found on this German guy's web site. Mixed in with all of the software downloads that he was offering were many blinking banners, advocating letting Jesus come into your life. That struck me as odd, because I don't think of the Germans as particularly prone to evangelism. (No Nazi flames, please.) But then I thought, well, they did have that one religious guy who was viewed as a radical in his time. You know, the guy who was named after a famous American civil rights leader.