A Spellchecking CLI

There is a rather nice command line spell checker called aspell. Basic usage is fairly simple.

aspell check file

This opens the file in an interactive spell checker. Consider this amusingly misspelled HTML file as an example.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Dorkument</title>
  </head>
  <bdy></bdy>
</html>

Now we run aspell check mispelled.html:

The aspell program. Apparently 'Dorkument' is mispelled.

We have many options available to us. In this case, replacing the word with a more appropriate title is in order. If we do so, the replacement happens immediately and we're done. No more spelling errors? What about bdy? Well, that's inside an HTML tag, and aspell is smart enough to know it's place and to not go around flagging code all over the place. That's what linters are for!

Note that if the file were not given the .html extension, then aspell would spell check it like a normal document, which is problably not what we are going for:

mv mispelled.html mispelled
aspell check mispelled

The aspell program, checking the spelling of an HTML document as if it weren't one.

However, there's a flag for that.

# the flag tells aspell that the file should be considered HTML
aspell check -H mispelled

One small gripe I have about the program is that it doesn't seem possible to replace a mispelled word with an empty string. You either have to ignore it, or replace it with something. Although perhaps I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Note: this document was spellchecked with aspell, and it appears to even recognize markdown code blocks, and HTML embedded inside markdown files. Nice!