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Tip 633 Previous Next Created: January 8, 2004 Complexity: intermediate Author: Anon Version: 6.0

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Poor man's grep of spell checking for Unix based systems.

Requires aspell/ispell to be available in path or use full path in map command.

map <A-e> :!echo <cword> \| ispell -d british -a -- <CR>
map <A-d> :!echo <cword> \| ispell -d danish -a -- <CR>

Spell check words in either English or Danish.

[edit] Comments

<A-e> is Alt-e. I've mapped it to ,s:

map ,s :!echo <cword> \| ispell -a -- <CR>

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You can append ;read after the pipe to be able to see the actual output from ispell.

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My little twist on this:

• to search the word under the cursor in normal mode:

:nmap sp :!echo <C-r><C-w> \| aspell -a<CR>

• to search the current visual selection:

:vmap sp y:!echo <C-r>" \| aspell -a<CR>

Now, if you want to check the word under the cursor in Insert mode, you can do:

<Ctrl+O>sp

I'm not sure I like the keystroke "sp" for normal mode, since I use vim's default mapping of "s" (:he s) a lot. this would only conflict if I wanted to "s" and insert something that started with a "p". I'll change it if it becomes a problem for me. You can do the same.

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