Using Cspell for other tools

[ChrisChinchilla]

Hey there! I am one of the maintainers of the VSCode extension for Vale, a style checker. Vale itself can identify spelling errors, but it's up to the tools that use it to figure out how to suggest alternative words and so for the VScode extension, I am looking into options to support that.

I was thinking of using hunspell or aspell as they are more "standard" and possibly likely to be installed on systems, but I was also digging around cspell and wondered if anyone has ever built an extension on top of it? Apart from your own of course.

Is that possible / allowed / a good idea?

[Jason3S]

@ChrisChinchilla,

I hope I don't make this more complicated than necessary. There are a few options depending upon what you are trying to do.

1. Using CSpell as a file spell checker (non-web).
   • all inclusive - give it a list of files and it does the rest.
   • partial - give it the document text, file type and file path, it does the rest. (this is how the VS Code extension works).
2. Using CSpell as a dictionary (web).
   It is possible to use CSpell Dictionary Library (needs documentation) to check words and generate suggestions. This is the intended path for web based solutions.
   • fetching the dictionary data (Note: all CSpell dictionaries are published and can be fetched from a CDN i.e. companies.txt (see https://www.jsdelivr.com/?docs=gh)
   • creating a dictionary or collection of dictionaries.

[ChrisChinchilla]

@Jason3S OK great, thanks for the response, I have some other options to also investigate, but will add this to the list!

[redtux]

Hi, I have been using CSpell with Vim and Codium for quite a while and recently started using vale with alex alongside CSpell.

As I am new to vale but already have a long list of custom dictionary words for CSpell (including common trademarks, fantasy names, etc.), it would be great if this list could be reused in vale, or if vale would use CSpell for spell checking and respect its rules. Are there any news regarding the integration you discussed here in December?

Greetings and thank you both for these great tools! They increase my productivity a lot and make writing consistent docs more fun. 🥳

[ChrisChinchilla]

@redtux Hello, we ended up using nspell as it was a lot lighter and easier to integrate. It also meant that we integrated better with the lists of words people maintain in Vale configuration, which then means that the word lists are maintained across Vale CLI, CI, etc etc… So that may not be the best option, but possibly we could look into pulling in those CSpell exceptions too if I can find time 😓