created 2006 · complexity intermediate · author Ben Staniford · version 5.7
This tip is deprecated for the following reasons:
Spell support is now built in as of Vim 7.0. Just :set spell spelllang=en_us
for example. Some people may prefer a different speller with a plugin but most users should use the built in functionality.
A little while ago, I tried out all the spelling plug-ins for Vim because I was doing a bit of a project and needed to make sure it was all beautifully spelled. One function that I found really lacking in the various spelling plug-ins was the ability to make suggestions on the current word. Some of them allowed this facility but there were restrictions, such as only being able to use it in graphical mode and only being able to use it on certain types of files. I wanted something that would work anywhere, whether in some code, in a text doc and that would work in console mode. I also wanted to see how easily I could in-line some Perl into a Vim script to perform some function on it. The answer to that was that it's not impossible, but it's a bit ugly!
Here's the function I created.
" F7 Will give some spelling suggestions for the current word in any mode nmap <F7> \ss vmap <F7> <C-C> \ss omap <F7> \ss map! <F7> <C-C> \ss noremap <silent> \ss :call SuggestWord()<CR> "Make some spelling suggestions for the current word, and allow you to change it for the word you prefer "Requires ispell and perl "By Ben Staniford function! SuggestWord () let rw = tempname() let oldspelling = expand("<cword>") "Run ispell on the word under the cursor and prompt us for a choice, then save it to a temp file exe '!echo -n '.oldspelling.' | ispell -a -S | perl -e '."\x27".'print "\n\n\n";'. \ 'while(<>) {if(/.*:\s(.*$)/){$m=1;@a=split ", ",$1;print "Suggestions: [CTL-C to abort]\n";'. \ 'for (@a) {print ++$i.")$_ "} print "\n>"; open (I, "/dev/tty"); $b=<I>; open(RW,">'.rw.'");'. \ 'print RW "$a[$b-1]";}}if($m\!=1){print "No Suggestions\n"}'."\x27" "If the user selected a word and it was saved, read it now if filereadable(rw) exe 'read ! cat '.rw exe "normal \"adw" exe "normal ddk" exe "normal /".oldspelling."\<CR>" exe "normal cw" "Print the word slightly differently if we're at the beginning of a line if (wincol() == 1) exe "normal \"aP" else exe "normal \"ap" endif endif endfunction "SuggestWord()
Comments[]
TO DO
Update tip for Vim 7. Spell checking is now built-in.
- And yet aspell has very good heuristics regarding alternatives suggestion.
- --Luc Hermitte 01:36, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Here's a version that does not require Perl:
nnoremap <silent><F2> :cal SpellSuggest()<CR> function! SpellSuggest() let s = substitute(system("echo ".expand("<cword>")." | aspell -a -W2 | grep '^&'"), "^.*:\\s\\(.*\\)\\n", "\\1,", "") if s != "" let slength = strlen(s) let end = 0 let i = 0 while end != slength let i = i + 1 let w = matchstr(s, "^\\%(.\\{-}\\zs[^ ,]\\+\\ze,\\)\\{".i."}") echon "(".i.")".w." " let end = matchend(s, w.",") endwhile echo "" let c = input("Replace with: ") if c =~ "^[1-9]\\d*$" && c > 0 && c <= i execute "normal! ciw".matchstr(s, "^\\%(.\\{-}\\zs[^ ,]\\+\\ze,\\)\\{".c."}") endif else echo "No suggestions" endif endfunction