Don't get me wrong, LyX's internal spellchecker does a good job of
implementing aspell. Except for two little things that make me wish I could
invoke aspell from the command line on a *.lyx file and have it skip all
the embedded lyx commands. I've looked at the docs for aspell and it looks
like there is a --mode=tex option, but I don't see anything about a
--mode=lyx option for it. <sigh>
I wouldn't care but for those two little things I mentioned. And to be sure
lyx's spellchecker isn't alone among gui spellchecker routines about which
these two things drive me a little crazy.
The first (And most obvious)issue is the way the pop-up spellchecker dialog
box often obscures the word in the text of the lyx document. I mean if it
simply determined where the word was displayed and opened the dialog box in
a different part of the screen so that I could see the syntax of my
spelling error so that I can remember whether I was talking about the chain
of "command" or about some character needing to use the "commode" I might
have a better chance of accepting the correct suggestion...
I can and do work around this by resizing my lyx document window to use
only the top half of the screen. And then moving the spellchecker dialog
box to the bottom half of the screen in the (so far well founded) hope that
{my window manager, or is it lyx itself?} will remember where to open the
next occurrence of the pop-up... But then of course I need to resize the
document window back to it's normal size again when I'm done spellchecking.
The second issue has to do with the fact that I'm a keyboard centric kind of
guy that really dislikes putting the keyboard down to wrestle with the
mouse. I know I can and do use <alt>+R to accept the default suggestion,
<alt>+I to ignore the intentionally misspelled word that I don't want added
to the dictionary. And I've even gotten used to the fact that it's <alt>+D
{which with the "D" being so close to the "R" on a qwerty keyboard has
caused more than a few erroneous additions to my ~/.aspell.en.pws file}
rather than a more intuitive <alt>+A to Add the word to the dictionary.
But what I can't do is to select something other than the topmost default
spelling suggestion with the keyboard. Oh I can use tab to get to the
suggestion list, then the arrow key to highlight an alternate suggestion.
But I can't find a way to get the spellchecker to use the now highlighted
suggestion without dusting off that torture device that controls the mouse
pointer and clicking on the word in question. IE: If I misspell cycle as
cyclen the default suggestion shows up as cyclone. With the 2nd choice being
cycle. I can use the keyboard to hi-light cycle, But this doesn't change the
fact that the actual "replacement" field still says cyclone. So of course
if I press enter cyclen will become cyclone... I have only three choices to
get the spellchecker to change cyclen to cycle. 1) double click on cycle
from the list of suggestions. 2) single click on cycle to change the
replacement field to cycle allowing either <alt>+R or <enter> to make the
change. 3) tab my way instead to the replacement field and manually edit
cyclone into cycle... <sigh>
I don't suppose that either of these two "issues" (think feature
request) will be resolved any time soon???
--
| ~^~ ~^~
| <?> <?> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
| ^ J(tWdy)P
| \___/ <<jtw...@ttlc.net>>
