Spell checker

Spell Checking

To turn on the vim spell checker run :set spell. To turn it off run :set nospell. If you always want the spell checker to be on, add set spell to your vimrc. You can turn spelling on only for certain filetypes using an auto command.

Once the spell checker is on, misspelled words will be highlighted. Type ]s to move to the next misspelled word and [s to move to the previous one. To see a list of corrected spellings, place the cursor on a misspelled word and type z=. You can type the number of the word you wish to replace the misspelled word with and hit <enter> to replace it, or you can just hit enter to leave the word unchanged.

With the cursor on a misspelled word, you can also type <number>z= to change to the <number>th correction without viewing the list. Typically you will use 1z= if you think vim’s first guess is likely to be the correct word.

Set Word List

To set the word list that vim will use for spell checking set the spelllang option. For example

:set spelllang=en        # set to English, usually this is the default
:set spelllang=en_us     # set to U.S. English 
:set spelllang=en_uk     # set to U.K. English spellings
:set spelllang=es        # set to Spanish

If you want to set the spelllang and turn on spell checking in one command, you can do:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en