Because we rely on hunspell and Emacs can use it.

Emacs supports three spelling checkers by default: Hunspell, which is now widely used by popular free software such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird; GNU Aspell, which pays particular attention to quality of suggestions, and the original Ispell. If no spell checker is manually configured, Emacs will choose aspell over hunspell over ispell.

Source: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractiveSpell

aspell hasn't seen an update since 2011 and the last attempt to get a new release out was a year ago and nothing came of it.

Fair enough. I guess it's time to update my emacs config. Thanks for taking a look.

@DataDrake my understanding is that the problem with Hunspell is that is has trouble trying parse camel cased words, whereas aspell has a run together option to deal with camel cased words, making aspell popular among programmers for parsing comments or technical writeups. Does hunspell currently have a way of dealing with camel caseing I am not aware of?

There is a github issue for Camel Casing, but it is still open: https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/issues/468

@retiform that may well be true, but it has nothing to do with our decision to reject aspell. That was based solely on aspell being unmaintained by its upstream.

Is the decision to reject aspell final? The reason was that it was stagnating since 2011 with no new releases, but there was a release in mid October last year which shows that it is still alive, and some applications rely on it with no alternative (i.e., Kakoune text editor, Matterhorn CLI client for Mattermost).