So, to answer my own question. The issue had come up before in comp.emacs.xemacs ================================================================ From: Colin Marquardt <colin.marquardt(a)usa.alcatel.com&gt; Subject: Re: Spell check while writting code... Keywords: comments,strings Newsgroups: comp.emacs.xemacs Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 10:00:01 -0700 Organization: Alcatel USA, Petaluma, CA 94954 Jason Boerner <jasonb(a)computer.org&gt; writes: ;;* flyspell comments and strings in programming modes ;; From: "Stefan Monnier <foo ＠ acm.com>" (defun flyspell-generic-progmode-verify () "Used for `flyspell-generic-check-word-p' in programming modes." (let ((f (get-text-property (point) 'face))) (memq f '(font-lock-comment-face font-lock-string-face)))) (defun flyspell-prog-mode () "Turn on `flyspell-mode' for comments and strings." (interactive) (ispell-change-dictionary "american") ;Comments are mostly in English. (setq flyspell-generic-check-word-p 'flyspell-generic-progmode-verify) (flyspell-mode 1)) (add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'flyspell-prog-mode t) Colin ========== I changed the above hook to (dolist (mode '(tcl-mode emacs-lisp-mode c++-mode sql-mode tcl-mode perl-mode ess-mode)) (put mode 'flyspell-mode-predicate 'flyspell-generic-progmode-verify)) -jeff From: Jeff Mincy <jeff(a)delphioutpost.com&gt; Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 21:36:21 -0400 To: xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org Subject: flyspell So, I just got around to enabling flyspell mode in my xemacs initialization, using: (global-flyspell-mode t) The problem is that for some modes (like say emacs-lisp-mode - or any other programming language mode) flyspell is being way too aggressive. So anyway, I was thinking that it would be more useful if flyspell only checked comments in programming modes. like maybe flyspell could only look at words that are in the font-lock-comment-face. Has somebody else done this already? This issue seems vaguely familiar. -jeff