In the _posts directory of this blog I have 1247 posts… Some of them are not very good or readable since they are WAY dated - I wrote the first in 2006. During these years I have also used a number of different tools and ways to write the blog (string with Blogger way back when). Much have changed. With the tooling and with me.
One concrete example is that in my code editor now, I have instant and brilliant spell checking. I’m using Code Spell Checker which seems to be the default choice for many.
It’s great but work on one file at the time. I wanted it to work on all my files at the same time. Let me show you how I made that work.
Turns out Code Spell Checker has a CLI through CSpell which can be downloaded as a NPM module and running that is pretty straight forward:
npx cspell _posts/**;
And that would have been the end of the post unless … it didn’t use my “user defined words” that I have collected over years of usage.
When Code Spell Checker is installed it stores it configuration in the settings.json file of VS Code. It is, in my case, stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json.
In that file I have a LONG list of user defined words. It looks like this;
"cSpell.userWords": [
"aaaaactually",
...
]
I wanted cspell to use this list. That is possible by just copying the word array and add it to a configuration file that can be passed to cspell using the --config flag. But that will not fly - I want to use the updated array of words, so that if I add a new word to the cSpell.userWords it will be used the next time I run npx cspell.
This required some bash-fiddling but it was quite fun. I used jq to extract the cSpell.userWords array and then create a cspell configuration file in my temp directory.
First I put the path to the VS Code settings.json file in a variable:
VSCODE_SETTINGS="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json"
if [ ! -f "$VSCODE_SETTINGS" ]; then
echo "VS Code settings.json not found at $VSCODE_SETTINGS"
exit 1
fi
And then I look in that file for the cSpell.userWords and get them into another variable:
USER_WORDS=$(grep -vE '^\s*//' "$VSCODE_SETTINGS" | jq '.["cSpell.userWords"] // []')
if [ "$USER_WORDS" == "null" ]; then
USER_WORDS="[]"
fi
I can now create a cspell config in the temp directory. Here I found out that it was important that this file used the extension .json or it would not work.
TEMP_CONFIG="$(mktemp).json"
cat > "$TEMP_CONFIG" <<EOF
{
"version": "0.2",
"language": "en",
"words": $USER_WORDS
}
EOF
echo "Created temporary cspell config at $TEMP_CONFIG"
With all that in place I can now call cspell. I’m using npx to do so, which will download the tool for me if I’m running it for the first time.
npx cspell --config "$TEMP_CONFIG" "$TARGET_FOLDER/**/*"
I can run the script using sh scripts/check-spelling.sh _posts or pipe the result into a file like this sh scripts/check-spelling.sh _posts > spelling-results.txt 2>&1.
The complete script is found here and includes some housekeeping and log statements.
Now I just have to fix the 3261 spelling errors, before I start to look into the markdown linting rules in the same thing.
(No there’s no working --fix flag for the cspell cli tool installed with npx.)