Emacs is the text exitor that does everything. Take a look at the liki pages on emacs in general, unicode, and org-mode.

Useful commands:

• Dynamic expansion, dabbrev-expand (M-/)
• Spell checking, ispell-word (M-$)
• Newline in minibuffer, C-q C-j.

Update on my earlier post. It seems that there are bugs running aspell on UTF-8 code via ispell.el.

For example, with the configuration I listed in my first post, running M-x ispell on a buffer containing

Grüß Gott       <- misspelled English with UTF-8 chars
“aBx”           <- misspelled English inside UTF-8 quotes

produced an error

Ispell misalignment: word `BaBx' point 58; probably incompatible versions

when aspell caught on “aBx”.

This seems to have been a problem for a while (2003 bug report and a possible 2005 patch against the 2003 ispell.el-3.7beta), but I don't know enough about emacs to want to go that deep. For now I will just run aspell -v <my-file> from another terminal and revisit the file from emacs afterwards, or I will highlight non-UTF-8 areas and ispell them seperately.

Another one of my “this is simple but I never remember it” posts: running aspell from emacs. Setup with

(setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell")

in your ~/.emacs file (from the aspell manual). Then use the standard emacs spelling commands:

• M-x flyspell-mode enables Flyspell mode, which highlights all misspelled words.
• M-x ispell spell-checks the active region or the current buffer.
• M-x ispell-message checks and corrects spelling of each word in a draft mail message, excluding cited material.
• M-$ (ispell-word) checks and corrects spelling of the active region or the word at point.
• C-g or X quits interactive spell checking. You can restart it again afterward with C-u M-$.

With a bunch more commands in the emacs manual