I love firefox's wiggly red line text box spelling checking. It's helped my online spelling greatly. Annoying that it's so American, but I could probably change that when I have time. I use ispell in emacs when I can, but I dislike it. Emacs should have wiggly red lines too! Ispell doesn't seem to be installed on chiark, but I haven't mentioned it yet because it may well be that I just don't understand about some subtlety about how emacs is set up.

FWIW, I found an British dictionary very quickly and installed it easily. I don't think my blood pressure could cope if 5% of my words were red because I wrote "XXour" or "ise" or "ize" :)

Ah, that's good. Next time I restart we'll see, :). Usually I don't bother hunting for UK English localisation, as it's often missing.

You're probably naturally a good speller. 5% of words is a good starting point for me, :). One of the things I like about wiggly line type spelling checkers is that you have to guess type in the correct spelling, which has helped me learn many words I've had a blind spot for for decades of using ispell (a pick and click style checker) (such as "occasion" "ridicule" "independent"), which I now (almost) always get right.

That was me, by the way.

You're probably naturally a good speller.

I might probably be, but I know for a fact I'm not :) Sorry, I picked 5% out of the air, I doubt it's accurate, but I mean, a high enough percentage that on nearly about every paragraph there'd be a word that I either have to add to the dictionary (making it inconsistent), ignore (letting the red line bother me for the rest of the writing), or change (giving in to the american dialect) and I know I couldn't stand any... :)

One of the things I like about wiggly line type spelling checkers

I don't like the phrase "wiggly line" because what I loved about firefox was that the red line wasn't wiggly :) But I know what you mean.

It seems like the best of both worlds. If it's an obvious typo, I can just move left and retype it. I try to do that, and I think I *have* improved on spelling. But if I'm not sure or want to see if it's in the dictionary, I can right-click and see the little list of suggestions :)

Ooh, idea -- you could combine a spelling test game thing with a real spelling checker -- it could record the number of reds not added to the dictionary and at the end of the month see if the number of typos and mistakes has gone down...

Firefox asked if I wanted it to install a British dictionary and I said yes, so it did, but it doesn't seem to use it. I gave up at that point.

I'm inclined to use -ize (following OED convention) and -our, which is enough of a minority position that spellcheckers don't cater for it much. I wouldn't use the things even if they did, though.

Have you tried flyspell-mode ?

There is a /usr/bin/ispell on chiark, but I've not tried making emacs talk to it.