If you and your teammates use Vim, you can use these techniques for avoiding spelling mistakes.
Machine-wide
Set up Vim spell-checking and word completion
on your machine’s ~/.vimrc:
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md set filetype=markdown
" Spell-check Markdown files
autocmd FileType markdown setlocal spell
" Spell-check Git messages
autocmd FileType gitcommit setlocal spell
" Set spellfile to location that is guaranteed to exist,
" can be symlinked to Dropbox or kept in Git
" and managed outside of thoughtbot/dotfiles using rcm.
set spellfile=$HOME/.vim-spell-en.utf-8.add
" Autocomplete with dictionary words when spell check is on
set complete+=kspell
thoughtbot shares these settings in our company-wide thoughtbot/dotfiles.
Project-specific
Each member of the team
can opt-in to a project-specific .vimrc file
by setting the following in their ~/.vimrc file:
set exrc
Then, add the project-specific .vimrc file to the Git repo:
set spelllang=en_us
set spellfile=en.utf-8.add
" Disable unsafe commands.
" http://andrew.stwrt.ca/posts/project-specific-vimrc/
set secure
This is merged with the machine-wide settings.
Alternatively, we could include all necessary options inside the project-specific file to provide coverage for teammates who don’t have machine-wide settings:
set spell
set spelllang=en_us
set spellfile=en.utf-8.add
set complete+=kspell
" Disable unsafe commands.
" http://andrew.stwrt.ca/posts/project-specific-vimrc/
set secure
Spell-checking
Edit a project file and Vim will highlight misspelled words.
Move to the next misspelled word with ]s
(or move backwards with [s)
and type zg (“good word”) to
add the word to the custom spell file:
Add a phrase (words with whitespace between them) to the spell file
by selecting characters in Visual mode and then typing zg.
Word suggestions
When the cursor is over a misspelled word,
get suggestions for the word with z=:
Tab completion
The words in the spell file will show up in tab completion
because .vimrc is configured with set complete+=kspell:
Shared spell file
Add the plain-text spell file, en.utf-8.add,
to version control in the project.
Vim uses a binary version,
en.utf-8.add.spl,
as a data structure to improve performance.
Ignore the binary version in .gitignore
because it will be automatically updated and reloaded when words
are added with zg:
en.utf-8.add.spl
The project-specific en.utf-8.add might look something like this:
RSS
SEO
Trello
URL
YAML
backticks
blog
iOS
repo
stylesheet
thoughtbot
vimrc
If you edit the file manually, the binary version will not be updated and reloaded automatically. In that case, run:
:edit <spell file>
(make changes to the spell file)
:mkspell! %
Conclusion
Add a .vimrc and shared spell file to your project
to build up a team-wide dictionary of shared terms,
help identify and correct misspellings,
and tab complete correctly-spelled words.
