I’ve been using flyspell-mode for the better part of two decades, and I’ve written about it a couple of times before. It gets the job done, but it has always felt a bit creaky to me - it checks words one at a time as you type, flyspell-buffer is painfully slow in big buffers, and you have to remember to enable flyspell-prog-mode in your programming modes, so it would check only comments and strings there.

Recently, as part of the ongoing overhaul of my personal Emacs config, I finally replaced it with jinx and I can already tell you that I’m not going back.

Why Jinx?

Jinx is a modern spell-checker by Daniel Mendler (of vertico, consult and corfu fame), built on top of libenchant.1 Quite a few things make it a great alternative to Flyspell:

  • It’s fast. Jinx checks only the visible part of the buffer (it hooks into Emacs’s JIT font-locking machinery), so it doesn’t matter if your buffer is 100 lines or 100,000 lines long. There’s no need for anything like flyspell-buffer - misspellings simply get highlighted as they scroll into view.
  • One mode everywhere. global-jinx-mode replaces both flyspell-mode and flyspell-prog-mode. Jinx decides what to check based on faces, so in programming modes it automatically limits itself to comments and strings.
  • Enchant is a facade over many spell-checking backends - Hunspell, Nuspell, Aspell, and (notably) AppleSpell on macOS. That last one means Jinx can use macOS’s built-in dictionaries and you don’t have to install any yourself.
  • Support for multiple languages at once. Set jinx-languages to something like "en_US bg" and Jinx will check both English and Bulgarian in the same buffer. As someone who writes in two languages every day, this alone would have sold me on it.
  • A much nicer correction UI. M-$ (jinx-correct) pops up a completing-read menu (lovely if you’re using vertico) with the suggestions, and below them - entries for saving the word to your personal dictionary, as a file-local word, or just for the current session. C-u M-$ corrects all the misspellings in the buffer in one go.

The Setup

Here’s the relevant bit of my config:

(use-package jinx
  :ensure t
  :hook (emacs-startup . global-jinx-mode)
  :bind (("M-$" . jinx-correct)
         ("C-M-$" . jinx-languages)))

M-$ is bound to ispell-word by default, so rebinding it to jinx-correct feels quite natural. jinx-languages allows you to switch the active languages for the current buffer on the fly.

One thing to keep in mind - Jinx uses a small native module to talk to libenchant, and this module gets compiled automatically the first time you enable the mode. In other words - you’ll need libenchant (plus pkgconf) and a C compiler on your system:

# macOS
brew install enchant

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libenchant-2-dev pkgconf

Admittedly, that’s a bit more setup than Flyspell, which is built-in and only needs an external aspell/hunspell binary. Flyspell will probably remain the path of least resistance, but in my opinion the small extra effort pays for itself many times over.

Note: Dropping Flyspell also frees up C-. and C-;, which happen to be prime keybinding real estate. In my setup they are now bound to embark’s embark-act and embark-dwim, but that’s a topic for another article.

Closing Thoughts

Funny enough, I knew about Jinx for quite a while, but I kept using Flyspell mostly because of inertia. I guess old habits die hard! Now that I’ve finally made the switch, I can’t help but wonder what took me so long.

Have you tried Jinx already? Are you still happily using Flyspell (or something else entirely)? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

That’s all I have for you today. Keep fixing those typos!

  1. I guess the name makes sense - what do you get from an enchantment gone wrong? A jinx! ↩