Linux spell-checker variety

[blnl]

What is the difference between different spell-checkers:

• myspell
• ispell
• aspell
• gtkspell
• hunspell

All these spell-checkers are installed on my system.
Is this optimal?
Are they conflicting each other?

[sdimhoff]

I have no idea what is under the hood of a spell checker, but if I had to guess I would say that the differences between the functionalities of each are probably small. I have only aspell, but that would probably depend on the system.

If you installed them all individually, I would say that it would probably be sub optimal. If your variation on portage/apt-get/yum/etc. installed them all as dependencies, I would say you probably need them all. Each one of those spell checkers was probably installed for a specific binaries. You could go through and see if the programs could instead all use aspell for instance, then uninstall the rest, but that is up to you.

[blnl]

I only installed ispell and aspell.
The other spell checkers were already there before, but I don't know which applications installed them.

What made you choose aspell and not ispell?
Is one better than the other?