4. Customizing Aspell

The behavior of Aspell can be changed by any number of options which can be specified at either the command line, the environment variable ASPELL_CONF, a personal configuration file, or a global configuration file. Options specified on the command line override options specified by the environment variable. Options specified by the environment variable override options specified by either of the configuration files. Finally options specified by the personal configuration file override options specified in the global configuration file. Options specified in the environment variable ASPELL_CONF, a personal configuration file, or a global configuration file will take effect no matter how Aspell is used which includes being used by other applications.

Aspell has three basic types of options: boolean, value, and list.

Boolean options are either enabled or disabled, value options take a specific value, and list options can either have entries added or removed from the list.