aspell dictionary

[kevinfish]

I've installed aspell and aspellDicts.en but when I do aspell -c it says:

Error: No word lists can be found for the language "en_US".

[bjornfor]

Did you try to log out and back in again? Aspell can unfortunately only handle one dict-dir directive, and the decision on which dict-dir to use is made in when you log in (in /etc/profile). So it is actually the expected behaviour that aspell doesn't find its dictionary until you log in again.

The only real fix is to patch aspell, teaching it to look at a list of dict-dirs. Other distros don't have this issue, because they just have a single place for aspell to look for dictionaries. But in nix they can be located in different profiles.

[bjornfor]

Also note that, until recently, aspell would only work if installed with nix-env. This changed in NixOS/nixos@0192c02 so that it'd work from any profile (system, default, user).

[kevinfish]

logging out and back in didn't help. It was installed globally. I'll try it with nix-env.

[peti]

@kevinfish, did you manage to remedy this issue?

[kevinfish]

@peti, I think so. How do I tell if I've installed something with nix-env -i overlaying a globally installed package?

[bjornfor]

@kevinfish: I can think of two ways.

• See output of which -a some-program
• See if nix-env -qsP lists anything you have in systemPackages.

[shlevy]

This issue seems fixed, please reopen if not.

[jwiegley]

This issue is not fixed:

Hermes:/usr/local/src/nixpkgs master $ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.aspell nixpkgs.aspellDicts.en
replacing old `aspell-0.60.6.1'
replacing old `aspell-dict-en-7.1-0'
installing `aspell-0.60.6.1'
installing `aspell-dict-en-7.1-0'
building path(s) `/nix/store/1g1bz5zxr9rpg79cmnkra724wb933ziv-user-environment'
created 1140 symlinks in user environment
Hermes:/usr/local/src/nixpkgs master $ aspell dicts
Hermes:/usr/local/src/nixpkgs master $ 

Doing some analysis reveals that the aspell install creates the following directory:

/Users/johnw/.nix-profile/lib/aspell-0.60

But nixpkgs.aspellDicts.en installs into this directory:

/Users/johnw/.nix-profile/lib/aspell

Using strace (well, dtruss on the Mac), I can verify that aspell is only look for dictionaries in the first directory, and so it doesn't find it.

[jwiegley]

@shlevy Please reopen

[jwiegley]

Note that this command does at least work:

aspell -d ~/.nix-profile/lib/aspell/en_US.multi pipe

[jwiegley]

Also, you can set this in ~/.aspell-conf:

data-dir /Users/johnw/.nix-profile/lib/aspell

[kyrias]

@jwiegley's solution works for me too, tho the file is called ~/.aspell.conf

[bjornfor]

Is this a darwin only issue? I don't see it on NixOS. When installing aspell I get ~/.nix-profile/lib/aspell (which the code in /etc/profile picks up), not ~/.nix-profile/lib/aspell-0.60.

[michelk]

On Fedora and Debian I don't have the directory aspell-0.60. Nevertheless ~/.nix-profile/lib/aspell is not picked up by aspell; setting data-dir solves it.

[matthiasbeyer]

It seems that this issue can be solved via configuration of aspell itself. Can we close this issue therefor?

Ping @kevinfish

[dysinger]

having to twiddle with a hard coded path (~ and $HOME don't work) in a config file is not the most awesome experience

[mbucc]

Whenever I have used it in the past, it works after install, no need to tell it where the dictionary lives.

[bjornfor]

Closing based on last comment.

[shanemikel]

I have this problem, too. (on OSX)

[FRidh]

If I am correct this is supposed to be solved with #24425 and can therefore be closed.

I've just opened #26622 where composition is used instead of going through the profiles to find the dictionaries.

[mjhoy]

aspell works fine for me now (darwin).

[turboMaCk]

This doesn't work for me on nixos even with .aspell-conf. I'm using nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable

marek@nixos-mainframe λ ~/Dotfiles (master●)   
❯❯❯ which aspell
/home/marek/.nix-profile/bin/aspell

marek@nixos-mainframe λ ~/Dotfiles (master●)   
❯❯❯ cat ~/.aspell-conf 
data-dir /home/marek/.nix-profile/lib/aspell

marek@nixos-mainframe λ ~/Dotfiles (master●)   
❯❯❯ ls /home/marek/.nix-profile/lib/aspell 
ccpp.amf             cp1255.cmap        iso-8859-10.cmap  iso-8859-2.cset  ispell             spell
comment.amf          cp1255.cset        iso-8859-10.cset  iso-8859-3.cmap  koi8-r.cmap        split.kbd
context-filter.info  cp1256.cmap        iso-8859-11.cmap  iso-8859-3.cset  koi8-r.cset        standard.kbd
context-filter.la    cp1256.cset        iso-8859-11.cset  iso-8859-4.cmap  koi8-u.cmap        tex.amf
context-filter.so    cp1257.cmap        iso-8859-13.cmap  iso-8859-4.cset  koi8-u.cset        tex-filter.info
cp1250.cmap          cp1257.cset        iso-8859-13.cset  iso-8859-5.cmap  none.amf           tex-filter.la
cp1250.cset          cp1258.cmap        iso-8859-14.cmap  iso-8859-5.cset  nroff.amf          tex-filter.so
cp1251.cmap          cp1258.cset        iso-8859-14.cset  iso-8859-6.cmap  nroff-filter.info  texinfo.amf
cp1251.cset          dvorak.kbd         iso-8859-15.cmap  iso-8859-6.cset  nroff-filter.la    texinfo-filter.info
cp1252.cmap          email.amf          iso-8859-15.cset  iso-8859-7.cmap  nroff-filter.so    texinfo-filter.la
cp1252.cset          email-filter.info  iso-8859-16.cmap  iso-8859-7.cset  perl.amf           texinfo-filter.so
cp1253.cmap          email-filter.la    iso-8859-16.cset  iso-8859-8.cmap  sgml.amf           url.amf
cp1253.cset          email-filter.so    iso-8859-1.cmap   iso-8859-8.cset  sgml-filter.info
cp1254.cmap          html.amf           iso-8859-1.cset   iso-8859-9.cmap  sgml-filter.la
cp1254.cset          html-filter.info   iso-8859-2.cmap   iso-8859-9.cset  sgml-filter.so

marek@nixos-mainframe λ ~/Dotfiles (master●)   
❯❯❯ echo "hi theree" | aspell -a
Error: No word lists can be found for the language "en_US".

[turboMaCk]

works when installed via nix-env -i

[arianvp]

Does not work when ran using nix run nixpkgs.aspell because the nix profile isn't available.

[arianvp]

Also does not work when installing with nix-env -i and setting config as documented above.

edit : aspellWithDicts works as expected, but requires aspell to be compiled from source every time you want to add a language, which is not ideal!

[rwanyoike]

The aspell config file is ~/.aspell.conf not .aspell-conf:

$ < ~/.aspell.conf
data-dir /Users/rwanyoike/.nix-profile/lib/aspell

An environment variable can also work:

ASPELL_CONF="data-dir ${HOME}/.nix-profile/lib/aspell"

You can confirm with aspell dump config:

$ aspell dump config | grep data-dir                                                                                                                                  # data-dir (string)
data-dir /Users/rwanyoike/.nix-profile/lib/aspell
# default: <data-dir> = /Users/rwanyoike/.nix-profile/lib/aspell
# local-data-dir (string)

[zaynetro]

Everything seems to be working fine in macos.

Instructions on how to get aspell working with a dictionary:

# Install aspell
nix-env -i aspell

# Install dictionary
nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA aspellDicts.en

# Test
echo "hi theree" | aspell -a

# Bonus: search for available dictionaries
nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -qaPA aspellDicts

[the-mikedavis]

with home-manager:

# ~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  # ..
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    # ..
    aspell
    aspellDicts.en
  ];

  home.file.".aspell.conf".text = "data-dir ${pkgs.aspell}/lib/aspell";
  # ..
}

works without rebooting/relogging 👍

[baracunatana]

If, like me, you had problems using aspell from emacs after upgrading to NixOS 21.11, what worked for me was adding data-dir /run/current-system/sw/lib/aspell to ~/.aspell.conf

[refaelsh]

Nothing worked until I rebooted my laptop.

[zzantares]

For me installing (aspellWithDicts (ds: with ds; [ en en-computers en-science ])) instead of aspell and aspellDicts.en (and others) worked.