padre does spell check

padre, the perl ide, can now check a text for spelling mistakes. this is done with the padre::plugin::spellcheck plugin. new version 1.0.0 is currently propagating on cpan, and should be available soon.

so, how to use it? the first step (beside installing padre and the plugin) is to enable it. open padre, go to plugins menu, open the plugin manager, then select the spell checking plugin, and click on enable:


(you will notice the nice icon, courtesy of mark james - open-source definitely needs artists besides coders)

of course, this should be done only once. that is, if you already tried this plugin, you don't need to re-enable it. (but if you already tried the plugin, then i can imagine that you're quite familiar with padre, and that you don't need this explanation)

so, the plugin is enabled, and you can now close the plugin manager. open the file that you want to spell check, and just press f7 (which seems to be the standard shortcuts among text processors to launch spell checking). this will check your text, and if there are some mistakes, it will open the following window:



the offending text will be selected. the buttons do what one can expect.

some things to note:

• only english is supported right now. this will change later on.
• the add to dictionary is not yet implemented.
• this plugin is using text::aspell (the perl bindings for aspell) underneath (yes, this means you need to have aspell installed on your machine). in the future, i plan to allow one to change the low-level options of aspell...
• check spelling a program is not a good idea. however,since aspell supports some filtering modes, i'll investigate them.
  

and don't forget that you're welcome to join the padre development team! we could use more contributors...