Spell checking in Vim

Mark Twain has been quoted as saying that he respected a person who could spell a word more than one way. Unfortunately, Twain’s enthusiasm for creative spelling isn’t widely shared today, at least in the professional world. (1)

You know Vim already from a lot of features, including Macros, Reg Ex, or code formatting. Now, let’s add spell checking:

Support for spell checking was added in Vim 7 and therefore it is really easy to activate:

:set spell spelllang=en_us

Afterwards, the misspelled words are highlighted red. To move to a misspelled word, use [s (backwards) and ]s (forwards). Once the cursor is on the word, Vim will suggest a list of alternatives, by typing (in command mode):

z=

You choose between these alternatives by typing the corresponding number.

Or, for example if you want to automatically check Markdown files (and only those), add this to your ~/.vimrc:

autocmd FileType md,markdown set spell spelllang=en_us

(Yes, spell checking for code could become very nasty…).

The support for English is included, but other languages can be added easily:

:set spell spelllang=es_es   # for Spanish
:set spell spelllang=de_de   # for German

When using :setlocal instead of :set, spell checking is activated only for the local tab/buffer.

In case the language is activated the first time, Vim asks you if it should be installed:

:setlocal spell spelllang=es_es
Cannot find spell file for "es" in utf-8
Do you want me to try downloading it?
# Type Y

Downloading es.utf-8.spl...
:!curl 'http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/es.utf-8.spl' -o '/tmp/vm1oj9D/47.spl'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
"/tmp/vm1oj9D/47.spl" [noeol] 1346L, 601018C
In which directory do you want to write the file:
1. /home/john-doe/.vim/spell
# Type 1

"~/.vim/spell/es.utf-8.spl" [New] 1346L, 601019C written
Do you want me to try getting the .sug file?
This will improve making suggestions for spelling mistakes,
but it uses quite a bit of memory.
# Type Y

Downloading es.utf-8.sug...
:!curl 'http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/es.utf-8.sug' -o '/tmp/vm1oj9D/47.sug'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
"~/.vim/spell/es.utf-8.sug" [New] 6292L, 1912378C written
Press ENTER or type command to continue

quite a bit of memory means in this case 2MB.

Deactivate the spell check by simply typing:

:set nospell

More details can be found on the blog of linux.com (1).

So, happy writing!