Jinx provides just-in-time spell-checking checking via libenchant. The package aims to achieve high performance and low resource usage, without impacting your editing experience. Overall Jinx should just work out of the box without much intervention.

Jinx highlights misspellings lazily only in the visible area of the window. Jinx binds directly to the native libenchant API, such that process communication with a backend Aspell process can be avoided. Libenchant is widely used as spell-checking API by text editors and supports Nuspell, Hunspell, Aspell and a few lesser known backends. Jinx automatically compiles and loads the native module at startup. Libenchant must be available for compilation. If pkg-config is available it will be used to locate libenchant. On Debian or Ubuntu, install the packages libenchant-2, libenchant-2-dev and pkg-config.

Jinx supports multiple languages in a buffer at the same time via the jinx-languages customization variable. It offers flexible settings to ignore misspellings via faces (jinx-exclude-faces and jinx-include-faces), regular expressions (jinx-exclude-regexps) and programmable predicates. Jinx comes preconfigured for the most important major modes.

Jinx offers three autoloaded entry points , the modes global-jinx-mode, jinx-mode and the command jinx-correct. You can either enable global-jinx-mode or add jinx-mode to the hooks of the modes.

(add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook #'global-jinx-mode)

(dolist (hook '(text-mode-hook prog-mode-hook conf-mode-hook))
  (add-hook hook #'jinx-mode))

In order to correct misspellings bind jinx-correct to a convenient key in your configuration. Jinx is independent of the Ispell package, so you can reuse the binding M-$ which is bound to ispell-word by default. When pressing M-$, Jinx offers correction suggestions for the misspelling next to point. If the prefix key C-u is pressed, the entire buffer is spell-checked.

(keymap-global-set "<remap> <ispell-word>" #'jinx-correct)

The technique to spell-check only the visible region of the window was inspired by Campbell Barton’s spell-fu package. Spell-fu maintains the dictionary itself via a hash table, which results in high memory usage for languages with compound words or inflected word forms. In Jinx we avoid the complexity of managing the dictionary and access the advanced spell-checker algorithms (affixation, compound words, etc.) directly via libenchant.

Jinx offers a similar UI as Augusto Stoffel’s jit-spell package and borrows ideas from it. Jit-spell uses Ispell process communication instead of a native API. It does not restrict the highlighting to the visible area. In my setup I observed an increase in load and latency as a consequence, in particular in combination with stealth locking and commands which trigger fontification eagerly like consult-line from my Consult package.

Since this package is part of GNU ELPA contributions require a copyright assignment to the FSF.