Vale.sh Vim Spellcheck

Vale.sh is a great tool for enforcing a writing style in your documents.

My vale.sh setup follows the one described in Writing like a pro with vale & Neovim, (albeit with my preferred LunarVim).

Once you’ve got Vale up and running, both it and Neovim spell checking will complain about the same things. Technical terms often appear as false positives, so the zg shortcut is handy. (zg adds the word under the cursor as a good word to your spellfile.) However Vale.sh still complains about the spelling you just whitelisted:

  Did you really mean 'blargh'? vale (Vale.Spelling) [17, 139]

A neat workaround is to link Vale Vocabularies accept.txt to your vim spellfile.

First, set up a Vale Vocab folder

mkdir -p styles/Vocab/Blog/

And configure Vale to use it

diff --git a/.vale.ini b/.vale.ini
index 636f9f3..db22387 100644
--- a/.vale.ini
+++ b/.vale.ini
@@ -4,6 +4,8 @@ MinAlertLevel = suggestion

 Packages = Microsoft, proselint, Hugo

+Vocab = Blog
+
 [*]
 BasedOnStyles = Vale, Microsoft, proselint

Then symlink the Vale accept.txt, for example

% ln -s ~/.config/lvim/spell/en.utf-8.add styles/Vocab/Blog/accept.txt
% ll styles/Vocab/Blog/accept.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 g g 39 Nov 12 17:51 styles/Vocab/Blog/accept.txt -> /home/g/.config/lvim/spell/en.utf-8.add

Now if you mark a word as ‘good’ in Neovim, Vale will accept it too.