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)
• Kakoune integration
• Ignore rules stored either in a global sqlite3 db (useful for personal files and such) - or in a configuration file (useful for CI and the like).

Installation

You will need:

• The C Enchant library installed, with its development headers
• The sqlite3 library installed, which 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
p : Add word to ignore list for the current project
f : Add word to ignore list for the current file
x : Skip this error
q : Quit
> : g
=> 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
p : Add word to ignore list for the current project
f : Add word to ignore list for the current file
x : Skip this error
q : Quit
> : e
=> Added 'fn' to the ignore list for '.rs' files

Note that by default, skyspell will try to read every file in the project. To prevent skyspell from trying to read certain file, create a skyspell-ignore kdl file containing something like this:

patterns {
   Cargo.lock  // no point in checking auto-generated files
   logo.png    // no point in trying to read non-text files
}

By default, ignore rules will be automatically added to this file when your run the above session, resulting in a file looking like this:

patterns {
  // same as above
}

global {
  // always ignored
  your-name
}


project {
  // ignored just for this project
  your-project-name
}

extension "rs" {
  // ignored for this extension
  fn
  impl
}

so that you can share your ignore rules with others.

By the way, there's a --non-interactive option to run skyspell check as part of your continuous integration.

Using an sqlite3 db instead

If you don't want the above behavior, you can tell skyspell to store ignore rules in a global sqlite3 database by using:

patterns {
   // Same patterns as above
}

use_db

By default, the path will be ~/.local/share/skyspell/<lang>.db, but you can use --db-path to change it.

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