Spelling in VIM

After writing yesterday’s post, I realized that I had spelled a couple of things wrong. More than a couple of things wrong. So looked into spell checking in VIM.

VIM spell checking

Apparently it’s as easy to enable within vim by typing the following:

:setlocal spell

Also, the language can be specified:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

Which is great! I started to use it and immediately had great results.

Below, you can see the highlighted typos. I can immediately scroll through the detected spelling mistakes by typing ]s and [s.

Once on the highlighted word, typing z= will show suggestions of what the word could/should be, and allows easy correction by specifying which is the correctly spelled word used in it’s place. An example of this is shown below.

If the word is a noun that does not show up in the dictionary, but is not incorrect spelling you can add it to the dictionary store.

I’ve chosen to create a spell file to add these words within my vim folder in the file ~/.vim/spell/en_us.utf-8.add. Specified within vim as below.

:set spellfile=~/.vim/spell/en_us.utf-8.add

Words such as Nefeli, which is the name of the company I am currently working at, will be added to this file, and not be flagged as a spelling mistake.

It is suggested that you can point to folder that is synced to Dropbox in order to keep your word additions synced up across multiple devices.

But… How do I auto-load onto VIM session?

All this is well and good, but, I want these extension features enabled immediately onto my VIM session!

Well, took a bit of digging, but found a way to do this… Sort of.

I was able to find the lines needed to have spell checking enabled on certain types of files, like *.md files, or others. It could get a bit annoying if you’re coding and the spell checker started to nitpick your choice of variables.

I’ve added the following lines to my .vimrc.

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md setlocal spell spelllang=en_us
set spellfile=~/.vim/spell/en_us.utf-8.add
autocmd FileType gitcommit setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

This allows spell correct to be enabled on any markdown file or within git commits I write, and also allows adding of words to the spell file which are not mistakes, but not found within an English dictionary.