What's Ubuntu's default terminal spell checker?

Question

There's a program that comes with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by default which is run totally in the terminal and will spell check a text file. But I have trouble remembering what the program is called. What is this program, and how do I run it on ~/Documents/file?

Solution 1

Ubuntu apparently comes with two spell-check programs by default:

$ apropos spell
aspell (1)           - interactive spell checker
aspell-autobuildhash (8) - Autobuilding aspell hash files for some dicts
aspell-import (1)    - import old personal dictionaries into GNU Aspell
enchant (1)          - a spellchecker
enchant-lsmod (1)    - Show information about available spell-checking module...

enchant is also an ispell-compatible spell-checker, and is listed in the ISO manifest, so it is installed by default.

And though it is not installed by default, Vim's full-fledged versions also support spell-checking, and do better in more complex files (for example, spell-checking only text in HTML).

Solution 2

The program I needed was aspell. It's very simple to run:

aspell check ~/Documents/file

It will automatically check the file for spelling errors based on the locale set. More information about it can be found in the man pages.

Hope this helps someone!

Comments

[anonymous2]

Muru, great point, I didn't know about that one!