Writing multilingual texts on Emacs

In my daily live I have to write multilingual texts. Since my preferred editor is Emacs, I've collected here a number of tools I use more or less every day.

Configuration of Gnome - input methods

Also in Emacs I depend on the input methods provided by my normal desktop manager, Gnome (cf. one of the previous articles for a configuration for XFCE). For the most part this boils down to just picking the corresponding input sources in the Gnome settings menu under keyboard and then choosing a key to switch between them (I use super + space, but your preferences may vary).

The only slightly more tricky part is the installation of IBus via the ibus package (if not anyhow done by your installation of choice). Gnome uses it by default.

If you want to, you can also configure it in your .bashrc:

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus

Configuration of Emacs

The configuration of Emacs basically boils down to picking the right packages and downloading them from MELPA. Flyspell is there by default, others like guess-language are convenient if you often mix languages in one text.

flyspell

guess-language - builds on trigram distributions, can render ispell-change-dictionary partially unnecessary

auto-dictionary - alternative to guess-language, builds on frequent words, , can render

langtool and https://languagetool.org/

Specifically for French, grammalecte can be an alternative to the languagetool and the langtool package.

Input Japanese using UIM

IBus

guess-language mode in Emacs

LanguageTool - Your writing assistant

Open source alternatives to Grammarly for word processing

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