*spell.txt* For Vim version 7.0aa. Last change: 2005 Jun 23 VIM REFERENCE MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Spell checking *spell* 1. Quick start |spell-quickstart| 2. Generating a spell file |spell-mkspell| 3. Spell file format |spell-file-format| {Vi does not have any of these commands} Spell checking is not available when the |+syntax| feature has been disabled at compile time. ============================================================================== 1. Quick start *spell-quickstart* This command switches on spell checking: > :setlocal spell spelllang=en_us This switches on the 'spell' option and specifies to check for US English. The words that are not recognized are highlighted with one of these: SpellBad word not recognized |hl-SpellBad| SpellRare rare word |hl-SpellRare| SpellLocal wrong spelling for selected region |hl-SpellLocal| Vim only checks words for spelling, there is no grammar check. To search for the next misspelled word: *]s* *E756* ]s Move to next misspelled word after the cursor. A count before the command can be used to repeat. This uses the @Spell and @NoSpell clusters from syntax highlighting, see |spell-syntax|. *[s* [s Like "]s" but search backwards, find the misspelled word before the cursor. Doesn't recognize words split over two lines, thus may stop at words that are not highlighted as bad. *]S* ]S Like "]s" but only stop at bad words, not at rare words or words for another region. *[S* [S Like "]S" but search backwards. To add words to your own word list: *E764* *zg* zg Add word under the cursor as a good word to 'spellfile'. In Visual mode the selected characters are added as a word (including white space!). *zw* zw Add word under the cursor as a wrong (bad) word to 'spellfile'. In Visual mode the selected characters are added as a word (including white space!). *:spe* *:spellgood* :spe[llgood] {word} Add [word} as a good word to 'spellfile'. *:spellw* *:spellwrong* :spellw[rong] {word} Add [word} as a wrong (bad) word to 'spellfile'. After adding a word to 'spellfile' its associated ".spl" file will automatically be updated. More details about the 'spellfile' format below |spell-wordlist-format|. Finding suggestions for bad words: *z?* z? For the word under/after the cursor suggest correctly spelled words. This also works to find alternative for words that are not highlighted as bad words. The results are sorted on similarity to the word under/after the cursor. This may take a long time. Hit CTRL-C when you are bored. You can enter the number of your choice or press if you don't want to replace. If 'verbose' is non-zero a score will be displayed to indicate the likeliness to the badly spelled word (the higher the score the more different). When a word was replaced the redo command "." will repeat the word replacement. This works like "ciw", the good word and . The 'spellsuggest' option influences how the list of suggestions is generated and sorted. See |'spellsuggest'|. PERFORMANCE Note that Vim does on-the-fly spell checking. To make this work fast the word list is loaded in memory. Thus this uses a lot of memory (1 Mbyte or more). There might also be a noticeable delay when the word list is loaded, which happens when 'spell' is set and when 'spelllang' is set while 'spell' was already set. Each word list is only loaded once, they are not deleted when 'spelllang' is made empty or 'spell' is reset. When 'encoding' is set all the word lists are reloaded, thus you may notice a delay then too. REGIONS A word may be spelled differently in various regions. For example, English comes in (at least) these variants: en all regions en_au Australia en_ca Canada en_gb Great Britain en_nz New Zealand en_us USA Words that are not used in one region but are used in another region are highlighted with SpellLocal |hl-SpellLocal|. Always use lowercase letters for the language and region names. When adding a word with |zg| or another command it's always added for all regions. You can change that by manually editing the 'spellfile'. See |spell-wordlist-format|. SPELL FILES *spell-load* Vim searches for spell files in the "spell" subdirectory of the directories in 'runtimepath'. The name is: LL.EEE.spl, where: LL the language name EEE the value of 'encoding' The value for "LL" comes from 'spelllang', but excludes the region name. Examples: 'spelllang' LL ~ en_us en en-rare en-rare medical_ca medical Only the first file is loaded, the one that is first in 'runtimepath'. If this succeeds then additionally files with the name LL.EEE.add.spl are loaded. All the ones that are found are used. Additionally, the file related to 'spellfile' is loaded. This is the file that |zg| and |zw| add good and wrong words to. Exceptions: - Vim uses "latin1" when 'encoding' is "iso-8859-15". The euro sign doesn't matter for spelling. - When no spell file for 'encoding' is found "ascii" is tried. This only works for languages where nearly all words are ASCII, such as English. It helps when 'encoding' is not "latin1", such as iso-8859-2, and English text is being edited. For the ".add" files the same name as the found main spell file is used. For example, with these values: 'runtimepath' is "~/.vim,/usr/share/vim70,~/.vim/after" 'encoding' is "iso-8859-2" 'spelllang' is "pl" Vim will look for: 1. ~/.vim/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.spl 2. /usr/share/vim70/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.spl 3. ~/.vim/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl 4. /usr/share/vim70/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl 5. ~/.vim/after/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl This assumes 1. is not found and 2. is found. If 'encoding' is "latin1" Vim will look for: 1. ~/.vim/spell/pl.latin1.spl 2. /usr/share/vim70/spell/pl.latin1.spl 3. ~/.vim/after/spell/pl.latin1.spl 4. ~/.vim/spell/pl.ascii.spl 5. /usr/share/vim70/spell/pl.ascii.spl 6. ~/.vim/after/spell/pl.ascii.spl This assumes none of them are found (Polish doesn't make sense when leaving out the non-ASCII characters). Spelling for EBCDIC is currently not supported. A spell file might not be available in the current 'encoding'. See |spell-mkspell| about how to create a spell file. Converting a spell file with "iconv" will NOT work! *E758* *E759* When loading a spell file Vim checks that it is properly formatted. If you get an error the file may be truncated, modified or intended for another Vim version. WORDS Vim uses a fixed method to recognize a word. This is independent of 'iskeyword', so that it also works in help files and for languages that include characters like '-' in 'iskeyword'. The word characters do depend on 'encoding'. The table with word characters is stored in the main .spl file. Therefore it matters what the current locale is when generating it! A .add.spl file does not contain a word table. A word that starts with a digit is always ignored. That includes hex numbers in the form 0xff and 0XFF. WORD COMBINATIONS It is possible to spell-check words that include a space. This is used to recognize words that are invalid when used by themselves, e.g. for "et al.". It can also be used to recognize "the the" and highlight it. The number of spaces is irrelevant. In most cases a line break may also appear. However, this makes it difficult to find out where to start checking for spelling mistakes. When you make a change to one line and only that line is redrawn Vim won't look in the previous line, thus when "et" is at the end of the previous line "al." will be flagged as an error. And when you type "thethe" the highlighting doesn't appear until the first line is redrawn. Use |CTRL-L| to redraw right away. "[s" will also stop at a word combination with a line break. When encountering a line break Vim skips characters such as '*', '>' and '"', so that comments in C, shell and Vim code can be spell checked. SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING *spell-syntax* Files that use syntax highlighting can specify where spell checking should be done: 1. everywhere default 2. in specific items use "contains=@Spell" 3. everywhere but specific items use "contains=@NoSpell" For the second method adding the @NoSpell cluster will disable spell checking again. This can be used, for example, to add @Spell to the comments of a program, and add @NoSpell for items that shouldn't be checked. VIM SCRIPTS If you want to write a Vim script that does something with spelling, you may find these functions useful: spellbadword() find badly spelled word at the cursor spellsuggest() get list of spelling suggestions ============================================================================== 2. Generating a spell file *spell-mkspell* Vim uses a binary file format for spelling. This greatly speeds up loading the word list and keeps it small. You can create a Vim spell file from the .aff and .dic files that Myspell uses. Myspell is used by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. You should be able to find them here: http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/spell_dic.html You can also use a plain word list. The results are the same, the choice depends on what you find. Make sure your current locale is set properly, otherwise Vim doesn't know what characters are upper/lower case letters. If the locale isn't available (e.g., when using an MS-Windows codepage on Unix) add tables to the .aff file |spell-affix-chars|. If the .aff file doesn't define a table then the word table of the currently active spelling is used. If spelling is not active then Vim will try to guess. *:mksp* *:mkspell* :mksp[ell][!] [-ascii] {outname} {inname} ... Generate a Vim spell file word lists. Example: > :mkspell nl nl_NL.words < *E751* When {outname} ends in ".spl" it is used as the output file name. Otherwise it should be a language name, such as "en", without the region name. The file written will be "{outname}.{encoding}.spl", where {encoding} is the value of the 'encoding' option. When the output file already exists [!] must be added to overwrite it. When the [-ascii] argument is present, words with non-ascii characters are skipped. The resulting file ends in "ascii.spl". The input can be the Myspell format files {inname}.aff and {inname}.dic. If {inname}.aff does not exist then {inname} is used as the file name of a plain word list. Multiple {inname} arguments can be given to combine regions into one Vim spell file. Example: > :mkspell ~/.vim/spell/en /tmp/en_US /tmp/en_CA /tmp/en_AU < This combines the English word lists for US, CA and AU into one en.spl file. Up to eight regions can be combined. *E754* *755* The REP and SAL items of the first .aff file where they appear are used. |spell-affix-REP| |spell-affix-SAL| This command uses a lot of memory, required to find the optimal word tree (Polish requires a few hundred Mbyte). The final result will be much smaller. When the spell file was written all currently used spell files will be reloaded. :mksp[ell] [-ascii] {add-name} Like ":mkspell" above, using {add-name} as the input file and producing an output file that has ".spl" appended. Since you might want to change a Myspell word list for use with Vim the following procedure is recommended: 1. Obtain the xx_YY.aff and xx_YY.dic files from Myspell. 2. Make a copy of these files to xx_YY.orig.aff and xx_YY.orig.dic. 3. Change the xx_YY.aff and xx_YY.dic files to remove bad words, add missing words, define word characters with FOL/LOW/UPP, etc. The distributed "src/spell/*.diff" files can be used. 4. Set 'encoding' to the desired encoding and use |:mkspell| to generate the Vim spell file. 5. Try out the spell file with ":set spell spelllang=xx_YY". When the Myspell files are updated you can merge the differences: 1. Obtain the new Myspell files as xx_YY.new.aff and xx_UU.new.dic. 2. Use Vimdiff to see what changed: > vimdiff xx_YY.orig.dic xx_YY.new.dic 3. Take over the changes you like in xx_YY.dic. You may also need to change xx_YY.aff. 4. Rename xx_YY.new.dic to xx_YY.orig.dic and xx_YY.new.aff to xx_YY.new.aff. SPELL FILE DUMP If for some reason you want to check what words are supported by the currently used spelling files, use this command: *:spelldump* *:spelld* :spelld[ump] Open a new window and fill it with all currently valid words. Note: For some languages the result may be huge and Vim may run out of memory. The format of the word list is used |spell-wordlist-format|. You should be able to read it with ":mkspell" to generate one .spl file that includes all the words. Only words for the current region are included. No "/regions" line is generated. Comment lines are used to indicate which .spl file the words came from. ============================================================================== 3. Spell file format *spell-file-format* This is the format of the files that are used by the person who creates and maintains a word list. Note that we avoid the word "dictionary" here. That is because the goal of spell checking differs from writing a dictionary (as in the book). For spelling we need a list of words that are OK, thus need not to be highlighted. Names will not appear in a dictionary, but do appear in a word list. And some old words are rarely used and are common misspellings. These do appear in a dictionary but not in a word list. There are two formats: one with affix compression and one without. The files with affix compression are used by Myspell (Mozilla and OpenOffice.org). This requires two files, one with .aff and one with .dic extension. The second format is a list of words. FORMAT OF WORD LIST *spell-wordlist-format* The words must appear one per line. That is all that is required. Additionally the following items are recognized: - Empty and blank lines are ignored. - Lines starting with a # are ignored (comment lines). - A line starting with "/encoding=", before any word, specifies the encoding of the file. After the second '=' comes an encoding name. This tells Vim to setup conversion from the specified encoding to 'encoding'. - A line starting with "/regions=" specifies the region names that are supported. Each region name must be two ASCII letters. The first one is region 1. Thus "/regions=usca" has region 1 "us" and region 2 "ca". In an addition word list the list should be equal to the main word list! - A line starting with "/?" specifies a word that should be marked as rare. - A line starting with "/!" specifies a word that should be marked as bad. - A line starting with "/=" specifies a word where case must match exactly. A "?" or "!" may be following: "/=?" and "/=!". - Digits after "/" indicate the regions in which the word is valid. If no regions are specified the word is valid in all regions. - Other lines starting with '/' are reserved for future use. The ones that are not recognized are ignored (but you do get a warning message). Example: # This is an example word list comment /encoding=latin1 encoding of the file /regions=uscagb regions "us", "ca" and "gb" example word for all regions /1blah word for region 1 "us" /!vim bad word /?3Campbell rare word in region 3 "gb" /='s mornings keep-case word FORMAT WITH AFFIX COMPRESSION There are two files: the basic word list and an affix file. The affixes are used to modify the basic words to get the full word list. This significantly reduces the number of words, especially for a language like Polish. This is called affix compression. The format for the affix and word list files is mostly identical to what Myspell uses (the spell checker of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org). A description can be found here: http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/affix.readme ~ Note that affixes are case sensitive, this isn't obvious from the description. Vim supports a few extras. Hopefully Myspell will support these too some day. See |spell-affix-vim|. The basic word list and the affix file are combined and turned into a binary spell file. All the preprocessing has been done, thus this file loads fast. The binary spell file format is described in the source code (src/spell.c). But only developers need to know about it. The preprocessing also allows us to take the Myspell language files and modify them before the Vim word list is made. The tools for this can be found in the "src/spell" directory. WORD LIST FORMAT *spell-dic-format* A very short example, with line numbers: 1 1234 2 aan 3 Als 4 Etten-Leur 5 et al. 6 's-Gravenhage 7 's-Gravenhaags 8 bedel/P 9 kado/1 10 cadeau/2 The first line contains the number of words. Vim ignores it, but you do get an error message if it's not there. *E760* What follows is one word per line. There should be no white space before or after the word. When the word only has lower-case letters it will also match with the word starting with an upper-case letter. When the word includes an upper-case letter, this means the upper-case letter is required at this position. The same word with a lower-case letter at this position will not match. When some of the other letters are upper-case it will not match either. The same word with all upper-case characters will always be OK. word list matches does not match ~ als als Als ALS ALs AlS aLs aLS Als Als ALS als ALs AlS aLs aLS ALS ALS als Als ALs AlS aLs aLS AlS AlS ALS als Als ALs aLs aLS The KEP affix ID can be used to specifically match a word with identical case only, see below |spell-affix-KEP|. Note in line 5 to 7 that non-word characters are used. You can include any character in a word. When checking the text a word still only matches when it appears with a non-word character before and after it. For Myspell a word starting with a non-word character probably won't work. After the word there is an optional slash and flags. Most of these flags are letters that indicate the affixes that can be used with this word. *spell-affix-vim* A flag that Vim adds and is not in Myspell is the flag defined with KEP in the affix file. This has the meaning that case matters. This can be used if the word does not have the first letter in upper case at the start of a sentence. Example (assuming that = was used for KEP): word list matches does not match ~ 's morgens/= 's morgens 'S morgens 's Morgens 's Morgens 's Morgens 'S morgens 's morgens *spell-affix-mbyte* The basic word list is normally in an 8-bit encoding, which is mentioned in the affix file. The affix file must always be in the same encoding as the word list. This is compatible with Myspell. For Vim the encoding may also be something else, any encoding that "iconv" supports. The "SET" line must specify the name of the encoding. When using a multi-byte encoding it's possible to use more different affixes. CHARACTER TABLES *spell-affix-chars* When using an 8-bit encoding the affix file should define what characters are word characters (as specified with ENC). This is because the system where ":mkspell" is used may not support a locale with this encoding and isalpha() won't work. For example when using "cp1250" on Unix. *E761* *E762* *spell-affix-FOL* *spell-affix-LOW* *spell-affix-UPP* Three lines in the affix file are needed. Simplistic example: FOL áëñ ~ LOW áëñ ~ UPP ÁËÑ ~ All three lines must have exactly the same number of characters. The "FOL" line specifies the case-folded characters. These are used to compare words while ignoring case. For most encodings this is identical to the lower case line. The "LOW" line specifies the characters in lower-case. Mostly it's equal to the "FOL" line. The "UPP" line specifies the characters with upper-case. That is, a character is upper-case where it's different from the character at the same position in "FOL". ASCII characters should be omitted, Vim always handles these in the same way. When the encoding is UTF-8 no word characters need to be specified. *E763* Vim allows you to use spell checking for several languages in the same file. You can list them in the 'spelllang' option. As a consequence all spell files for the same encoding must use the same word characters, otherwise they can't be combined without errors. If you get a warning that the word tables differ you may need to generate the .spl file again with |:mkspell|. Check the FOL, LOW and UPP lines in the used .aff file. The XX.ascii.spl spell file generated with the "-ascii" argument will not contain the table with characters, so that it can be combine with spell files for any encoding. The .add.spl files also do not contain the table. AFFIXES *spell-affix-PFX* *spell-affix-SFX* The usual PFX (prefix) and SFX (suffix) lines are supported (see the Myspell documentation). Note that Myspell ignores any extra text after the relevant info. Vim requires this text to start with a "#" so that mistakes don't go unnoticed. Example: SFX F 0 in [^i]n # Spion > Spionin ~ *spell-affix-PFXPOSTPONE* When an affix file has very many prefixes that apply to many words it's not possible to build the whole word list in memory. This applies to Hebrew (a list with all words is over a Gbyte). In that case applying prefixes must be postponed. This makes spell checking slower. It is indicated by this keyword in the .aff file: PFXPOSTPONE ~ Only prefixes without a chop string can be postponed, prefixes with a chop string will still be included in the word list. KEEP-CASE WORDS *spell-affix-KEP* In the affix file a KEP line can be used to define the affix name used for keep-case words. Example: KEP = ~ See above for an example |spell-affix-vim|. RARE WORDS *spell-affix-RAR* In the affix file a RAR line can be used to define the affix name used for rare words. Example: RAR ? ~ Rare words are highlighted differently from bad words. This is to be used for words that are correct for the language, but are hardly ever used and could be a typing mistake anyway. When the same word is found as good it won't be highlighted as rare. BAD WORDS *spell-affix-BAD* In the affix file a BAD line can be used to define the affix name used for bad words. Example: BAD ! ~ This can be used to exclude words that would otherwise be good. For example "the the". Once a word has been marked as bad it won't be undone by encountering the same word as good. REPLACEMENTS *spell-affix-REP* In the affix file REP items can be used to define common mistakes. This is used to make spelling suggestions. The items define the "from" text and the "to" replacement. Example: REP 4 ~ REP f ph ~ REP ph f ~ REP k ch ~ REP ch k ~ The first line specifies the number of REP lines following. Vim ignores it. SIMILAR CHARACTERS *spell-affix-MAP* In the affix file MAP items can be used to define letters that very much alike. This is mostly used for a letter with different accents. This is used to prefer suggestions with these letters substituted. Example: MAP 2 ~ MAP eéëêè ~ MAP uüùúû ~ The first line specifies the number of MAP lines following. Vim ignores it. A letter must only appear in one of the MAP items. It's a bit more efficient if the first letter is ASCII or at least one without accents. SOUNDS-A-LIKE *spell-affix-SAL* In the affix file SAL items can be used to define the sounds-a-like mechanism to be used. The main items define the "from" text and the "to" replacement. Example: SAL CIA X ~ SAL CH X ~ SAL C K ~ SAL K K ~ TODO: explain how it works. There are a few special items: SAL followup true ~ SAL collapse_result true ~ SAL remove_accents true ~ "1" has the same meaning as "true". Any other value means "false". vim:tw=78:sw=4:ts=8:ft=help:norl: