General Information:

Author: Anthony Panozzo

Contact: [email protected]

Script URL: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2429

License: GPL

Detailed description:

Looking through the examples in Vim, there are examples of correcting typos and misspellings like:

iabbrev teh the
iabbrev het the
...

However, it is time-consuming to create this list by hand. You also have to enter the correct capitalization, which is a pain. ('teh->the' will not work for 'Teh->The')

I found a nice list from Wikipedia and cleaned it up a bit as a basis, and incorporated the typo fixes from Vim Cream. I also added some words that I commonly misspelled or mistyped, and have taken additional contributions from users of the script.

I'm sure there are some mistakes, or common mistakes that aren't in here yet, so if you find any, please contact me and I will gladly change things. There are some additional details or thoughts as well as a shortcut to a word-processing mode at http://www.panozzaj.com/blog/2008/11/06/vim-word-processing

There is a GitHub repository that you can contribute to at http://github.com/panozzaj/vim-autocorrect/tree/master

Install details:

This plugin works with Vundle and Pathogen out of the box and so this is the recommended method of installation. However, if you do not want to use Vundle or Pathogen, download the .tar file, and add autocorrect.vim to the 'plugin' folder in your .vim directory.

The plugin does not load all the correction mappings automatically, as this slows down Vim's startup time by at least one second which is often annoying. Instead, you can type:

:call AutoCorrect()

inside Vim to load the corrections.

If you want to automatically load the corrections for certain filetypes, you can put something like this in your .vimrc file (example is for .txt files):

autocmd filetype text call AutoCorrect()

If you want to load the corrections all the time, and can bear waiting one second every time you use Vim, put this in your .vimrc:

call AutoCorrect()

Troubleshooting

If you are getting the following error:

E117: Unknown function: AutoCorrect

You might check that you have the plugin loaded with your Vim bundler of choice before invoking the AutoCorrect function automatically, or invoke it manually. For more details, see this issue.

General thoughts

Currently Vim has no built-in way to correct multiple words, so doing something like 'a a->a' is not possible. There is a file in the GitHub repository that contains some of these in case there ever comes an easy way to do this.

My philosophy on contributions is to take only the ones that I could reasonably see a sober person making on a qwerty keyboard who is in a hurry. So if there are random characters in there, it's not likely going to make it in. That should capture 95% of errors, since most are due to spelling errors or transpositions.

If there is a questionable correction, I consult Google. Slightly antiquated words will be left as-is. If the left side is correct already, I won't add that correction. If something is close to two words, I will take the more common one, or just leave out the correction.

I've thought about adding ones like (c)->©, but it's not clear to me how many people would benefit from this. So I guess in general, my philosophy is to make the changes that will help most of the people most of the time.

Contributions

Thanks to Duncan de Wet (duncannz) for turning this into a Vundler/Pathogen style plugin and making some improvements.

Thanks to Igor Dvorkin (@idvorkin) for adding a guard to ensure the plugin is only loaded once.