There are times when we edit prose in Vim, such as in a project README or git
commit message. In those cases, we can use Vim’s spell-checking to help us
avoid embarrassing mistakes.
Switching on spell-checking
We can switch on spell checking with this command:
:setlocal spell
We can also specify the language:
:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us
What does it look like
Here’s a screenshot of what I see as I edit this blog post:
The highlighted words are considered misspellings.
Spell check per filetype
It would be tedious to manually turn on spell-checking each time we need it. Luckily, we can guess by convention that we’ll want to spell-check certain files.
We automatically turn on spell-checking for Markdown files based on their file
extension with this line in our ~/.vimrc via thoughtbot/dotfiles:
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md setlocal spell
Another way to do it for certain filetypes is like this:
autocmd FileType gitcommit setlocal spell
We get word completion for free
By turning on spell-checking in our ~/.vimrc, we’ll be turning on word
completion as well. The following command will let us press CTRL-N or
CTRL-P in insert-mode to complete the word we’re typing!
set complete+=kspell
Add words to the dictionary
We can add words like “RSpec” or “thoughtbot” to the spellfile (just a list
of correctly-spelled words, not a list of magical incantations) by cursoring
over those words in a file and typing:
zg
What’s next
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