Spell check your work

Since version 7, Vim has the ability to spell check documents on the fly. We can enable this functionality with the following command:

:set spell

Furthermore, we can also specify a regional variant of a language:

:set spelllang=en_us

The default spelllang=en will allow a word whose spelling is acceptable in any English-speaking region.

See it in action

In the following screenshot, the underlined word is considered a misspelling.

In Normal mode, we can jump backward and forward between misspelled words using ]s and ]s commands, respectively. Then, issuing the z= command, we instruct Vim to suggest a list of correctly spelled words for the word under/after the cursor. The prompt at the bottom of the screen advises us to insert the index of the word we want to use in place of the misspelled word.

Spell check for file type

Instead of manually turn on the spell checker each time we need it, we can turn it on based on the file’s extension. My preferred way of accomplish that is creating a file whose name is <filetype>.vim under ~/.vim/ftplugin with setlocal spell in its content. You can take a look at my dotfiles, which contains examples for gitcommit and markdown files.

Adding words to the spell file

In Normal model, we can add any word to the spellfile by cursoring over the desired word and issuing the command zg.