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Spell Checking

Installation​

See: Installation

Basic Usage​

Example: recursively spell check all JavaScript files in src

JavaScript files

cspell "src/**/*.js"
# or
cspell lint "src/**/*.js"

Check everything

cspell .
# or
cspell "**"

Adding CSpell to an existing project

In the steps below we will create a cspell configuration file and setup a single custom dictionary for the project.

Steps:

  1. Create a configuration file
  2. Add words to the project dictionary

1. Create a configuration file.​

CSpell can use JSON, Yaml, and JavaScript files for configuration. It automatically searches for one of the following: cspell.json, cspell.config.yaml, cspell.config.cjs.

For now choose to use either JSON or Yaml. Below are examples of each that include a custom dictionary definition. Both of them are equivalent. If you have both, CSpell will look for the .json file first.

{
    "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/streetsidesoftware/cspell/main/cspell.schema.json",
    "version": "0.2",
    "dictionaryDefinitions": [
        {
            "name": "project-words",
            "path": "./project-words.txt",
            "addWords": true
        }
    ],
    "dictionaries": ["project-words"],
    "ignorePaths": ["node_modules", "/project-words.txt"]
}

These configuration files do three things:

  1. Define the custom dictionary project-words.
  2. Tell the spell checker to use the custom dictionary.
  3. Tell the spell checker to ignore any files inside of node_modules and the file project-words.txt.

2. Add words to the project dictionary​

It might take a few iterations to get fully setup, but the process in the same.

Steps:

  1. Create the dictionary file

    touch project-words.txt

  2. Choose a set of files to start with, like all Markdown files, **/*.md and run the spell checker.

    cspell "**/*.md"

  3. Look for any directories that need to be ignored and add them to ignorePaths. Example:

    • "bin" - to ignore any directory / file called bin.
    • "translations/**" - to ignore all files under the translations directory.
    • "packages/*/dist" - to ignore the dist directory in each package.

    Once you have finished identifying directories and files to be ignored, it is now time to add words to the custom dictionary.

  4. Have CSpell populate it with the words from your project.

    echo "# New Words" >> project-words.txt
    cspell --words-only --unique "**/*.md" | sort --ignore-case >> project-words.txt

    This will append all new issues to the end of project-words.txt

  5. Review the words in project-words.txt to check for any actual misspellings and remove them (the spell checker already thinks they are wrong).

  6. Fix spelling issues.

    To show the issues and suggestions, use:

    cspell --no-progress --show-suggestions --show-context "**/*.md"

  7. Repeat the process with the other file types you want to check.

3. Fine-tuning​

The following resources can help you with fine-tuning your configurations:

Help

Command: lint -- Spell Checking​

The lint command is used for spell checking files.

Help​

cspell lint --help

Options​