Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 120

Spell Check Your Work

With the spell checker enabled, Vim flags words that are not in its spell file. We can quickly jump between spelling mistakes and have Vim suggest corrections.

Take this excerpt of text:

spell_check/yoru-moustache.txt

Yoru mum has a moustache.

The first word has clearly been misspelled. We can make Vim highlight it as such by enabling the built-in spell checker:

:set spell

The word “Yoru” should now be flagged with the SpellBad syntax highlighting. Typically, that means the word will be underlined with a red dashed line, but how it looks will depend on which color scheme you use.

By default, Vim checks spellings against a dictionary of English words. We’ll see how to customize this in Tip 121, but for ...