Syntactic Sugar

EMACS IS gorgeously extensive, but there is very little hand-holding. Short of packages like Spacemacs, it provides very little functionality out of the box. A pretty basic function of a editor is spellchecking. Fortunately, it's fairly simple matter to set it up.

Check Flycheck is installed Flycheck should already be installed on your emacs instance. If it isn't, go ahead and install it.

Install Hunspell for windows The pre-compiled Aspell binaries for Windows are miles out of date at this point. Go ahead and install Hunspell. You can find some (relatively) up to date binaries for windows here. Make note of where you installed Hunspell.

Add the following to your Emacs config

(add-to-list 'exec-path "path\\to\\hunspell\\hunspell-1.3.2-3-w32-bin\\bin")
(setq ispell-program-name "hunspell")
(setq ispell-local-dictionary "en_US") 
(setq ispell-local-dictionary-alist
    '(("en_US" "[[:alpha:]]" "[^[:alpha:]]" "[']" nil ("-d" "en_US") nil utf-8)))

Save and restart emacs

Flyspell can be activated with M-x Flyspell-mode. You may need to call Flyspell-buffer to check the entire buffer after activating Flyspell mode.