skyspell

A fast and handy spell checker for the command line.

Features

• Handy command line interface
• Leverages the excellent enchant library, so compatible with existing providers and dictionaries
• Hand-made tokenizer, which means
  • it can parse camelCase , snake_case identifiers
  • it knows how to skip URLs, sha1s and the like
  • it handles abbreviations like in HTTPError
  • ... and more!
• Global ignore list
• Ignore list per file extension (like fn for .rs), projects, or relative path inside projects
• Skip list per file names (like always skipping files named Cargo.lock)
• Skip list per relative path inside a project (like image.svg)
• All of the above are stored in a toml files, which makes it easy to backup/restore your ignore rules, or use them for CI.
• Kakoune integration

Installation

You will need:

• The C Enchant library installed, with its development headers
• One of Enchant's backends (aspell, hunspell, nuspell)
• A dictionary for the language you'll be using matching one of the above backends (like aspell-en or hunspell-fr).
• cargo

Then run:

$ cargo install skyspell

and make sure skyspell is in your PATH.

Checking setup

Run skyspell suggest helllo, and check that the word hello is suggested.

skyspell in action

Usually, you will run skyspell check to start an interactive session, where you tell skyspell how to handle all the errors it finds in your project files:

$ skyspell check
LICENSE:9:2 Redistributions
What to do?
a : Add word to global ignore list
e : Add word to ignore list for this extension
...
x : Skip this error
q : Quit
> : a
=> Added 'Redistributions' to the global ignore list

foo.rs:32:2 fn
What to do?
a : Add word to global ignore list
e : Add word to ignore list for this extension
...
q : Quit
x : Skip this error
> : e
=> Added 'fn' to the ignore list for '.rs' files

Ignore rules will be automatically added to either:

• skyspell-ignore.toml, the local file, if the word is ignored for the project or for a path
• or in ~/.local/share/skyspell/global.toml, the global file, if the word is ignored globally or for a given extension.

That way you can share your ignore rules with other users, or back them up anyway you like.

Note that skyspell will honor XDG_DATA_DIR when looking for the global file.

Excluding files from the check

Note that by default, skyspell will try to read every file in the project, or if the project is using git, every file not ignored by git. This may include for instance binary files.

To prevent skyspell from trying to read those files, create a skyspell-ignore.toml file at the root of your project containing something like this:

patterns = [
   "Cargo.lock",
   "logo.png ",
]

Comparison with scspell

I've borrowed heavily from scspell - both for the implementation and the command line behavior.

Note that scspell does not depend on Enchant and so can not check Languages other than English, and also cannot offer suggestions for spell errors.

But it's implementation is simpler and does not require to install a spell provider.

On the other hand, scspell can apply replacements in a file automatically, a feature skyspell does not have.

Local development

To build faster and run the tests faster, you can use

• mold
• cargo nextest