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Configuring Geany to Have (And Use) Spell Check

OliverK's picture
Submitted by OliverK on November 30, 2009 - 1:14pm

So, I was going to write a speech, and I really like using Geany for all my writing needs. However, my spelling is horrendous. (Its a confirmed fact on IRC, ask just about anybody.) So, I needed spell check. How to go about it? Well, here we go:

  1. Download the plugin package from here. A direct link to the package you need.
  2. If you have a local copy of geany, you can run the installer. Or you can use something like 7Zip to extract our the *.dll's. Look in the lib folder.
  3. Copy out spellcheck.dll to GeanyPortable\App\Geany\lib.
  4. If you open up the Readme.windows.txt, it will tell you where to get the enchant libraries that are needed. I downloaded enchant_1.5.0-2_win32.zip
  5. Extract the file.
  6. Copy the folder bin, lib and share to GeanyPortable\App\Geany\. Windows will warn you about overwriting existing files in the folders. Go ahead and copy it as it won't overwrite anything because there's no other files with the same name to overwrite.
  7. If you try to run it right now, it will complain about not having dictionaries. Let's set those up

  8. Go to the OpenOffice website and download the English spell check plugin. Page Link
  9. Extract with 7Zip
  10. Copy out en_US.aff and en_US.dic to wherever you would like them. I put them in Data under dictionaries (GeanyPortable\Data\dictionaries)so they're protected from upgrades.
  11. Run Geany
  12. Click tools, plugin manager
  13. Enable spellcheck. It will complain about dictionaries.
  14. Click preferences and set the dictionary location to where ever you installed the dictionaries. In my case, GeanyPortable\Data\dictionaries.
  15. Celebrate. You're done.

If you're using the installed version of Geany, these instructions will work, you just need to use a little extra thought. Mostly, change some paths around. Biggrin

EDIT:EDIT: I'll be updating the portable build to handle the dictionary in some method. Done Smile

Comments

TomaszJanicki's picture

I had to download Firefox ones (Marco Pinto) rename all "en-gb" to "en_gb" - so underscore is either required or simply dash not allowed in the file names for hunspell

TJ

As of Geany 1.36 this instruction is not working.
It seems now enchant-2 is used. After copying the new enchant-2 folder to lib and some other files the spellchecker plugin started working but doesn't accept my dictionaries anymore.
I think we need Geany with the plugins installed, because it is not possible to run geany-plugins-1.36_setup.exe if Geany is portable and not installed.