patrbal / vim-textidote

Spelling, grammar and style checking on LaTeX or Markdown documents from Vim or Neovim

vim-textidote

Description

This plugin interfaces Vim and Neovim with the TeXtidote grammar checker. TeXtidote is an open source spelling, grammar and style checker for multiple languages based on LanguageTool. TeXtidote is built on top of LanguageTool and is able to remove LaTeX and Markdown markup before grammar checking, while keeping track of the relative position of words between the original and "clean text". In short, TeXtidote is a version of LanguageTool made blind to LaTeX and Markdown markup.

This plugin provides asynchronous integration of both TeXtidote and LanguageTool, with highlighting of the spelling and grammar errors. It offers also easy and intuitive navigation of the errors, as well as quick fixes by <Tab> completion.

Screenshots

Example in Vim:

Html report in browser:

Installation

Install vim-textidote using your favorite package manager, or use Vim's built-in package support:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/PatrBal/start
cd ~/.vim/pack/PatrBal/start
git clone https://github.com/PatrBal/vim-textidote
vim -u NONE -c "helptags vim-textidote/doc" -c q

Download the latest textidote.jar from TeXtidote and make sure that you have Java version 8 or later installed on your system. Specify the location of the file textidote.jar in your $HOME/.vimrc file. Example:

let g:textidote_jar = '~/.vim/textidote.jar'

Usage

:[range]TeXtidoteToggle
By default [range] is the whole buffer, except in the case where there is a visual selection which is then taken as the default [range].

Features

• Asynchronous spell, grammar and style checking of either the entire buffer or part of it, with highlighing of the spelling and grammar errors in distinct colors. The default grammar checker is TeXtidote, but the option of using LanguageTool instead is also possible.
• A scratch buffer shows up, listing all the errors. Navigate the errors using [ and ], both in the scratch buffer and in the original buffer. Hit <Enter> on an error in the scratch buffer to jump to that error. Hit <Tab> on an error in the original buffer to fix it. Also, <BackSpace> discards an error both in the scratch buffer and in the original buffer.
• Option to use a custom dictionary which can be synchronized with Vim's own spellfile.
• The location-list is populated, so that you can use location-list Vim commands such as :lopen to open the location-list window, :lne to jump to the next error, etc.
• Optionally, a full html report of TeXtidote analysis can be displayed in the default browser.

Alternatives

• A very good alternative is to use the LTeX language server, for example together with coc.nvim. It is also based on LanguageTool and is aware of LaTeX or Markdown markup. It provides grammar checking as you type, but does not currently offer suggestions or quick fixes with coc.nvim. LTeX can be both an alternative to vim-textidote or an addition. In that case, it can be configured to use the same custom dictionary as vim-textidote and Vim's own spell-checker.
• The only other alternative (as far as I know) is to use YaLafi (Yet another LaTeX filter) together with vim-LanguageTool, vim-grammarous, or... vim-textidote. This provides an experience somewhat similar to vim-textidote with TeXtidote, but handling custom dictionaries in LanguageTool, and therefore in YaLafi, is not very convenient.

License

Copyright © Patrick Ballard. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license.

Credit

This plugin is strongly based on the excellent vim-LanguageTool. Large parts of its code have been reused.