I’m working on adding spell checking support to gitg. If you intend to use gitg without installing it, a little hack is necessary. You’ll need to symlink the gitg directory (the one with the source files) as ui.
ln -s gitg ui
./configure /pathto/below/gitg
The reason is that gitg will look for Glade UI files under $(datadir)/gitg/ui and in gitg’s source the UI files are in the gitg directory and not in ui.
You can see above a screenshot of gitg with spell checking enabled. Hopefully I’ll be done with the changes soon and they will be merged to upstream quickly.
Update: There are couple more things to do in order to get gsettings’ schemas right.
mkdir glib-2.0
ln -s ../data glib-2.0/schemas
glib-compile-schemas data/
XDG_DATA_DIRS=".:/usr/share/" ./gitg/gitg
For the schemas thing see glib-compile-schemas‘ man page.
Update 2011-12-17: Jesse (gitg’s maintainer) hasn’t responded to my email regarding the new feature, so I’ve open a bug (#666406) for it. If you’re willing to try the changes yourself, you can pull them from git://github.com/guyru/gitg.git spellchecker.