Did you know that? I didn’t.

I just started this blog and I’ve been using Neovim to type my markdown posts. The only thing I felt was missing was a spell checker, so I DDG it up. Turns out Vim and Neovim have had a spell checker since over 10 years. To be fair, I only started using Vim (then Neovim) just a year or 2 ago.

To enable temporary spell check for English do: 

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

You will then notice a colored wavy line under misspelled words as you would expect from any spell checker. You can navigate through them with ]s to move to the next and [s to the previous mistake. You can then do z= to popup a list of replacement suggestions.

Permanently

You can enable the feature permanently by adding this line to your .vimrc or vim.init depending if you use Vim or Neovim:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile * setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

Markdown only

I personally only want the spell checker for markdown files so I add this in my .vimrc/vim.init instead:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

That’s it for now.

I love finding new features out of programs I’ve been using for a while, especially the kind of features that make my life easier.