Vale is a command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose. It's fast, cross-platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), and highly customizable.
Hi there! I'm @jdkato, the sole developer of Vale. If you'd like to help me dedicate more time to developing, documenting, and supporting Vale, feel free to donate through the Open Collective. Any donation���big, small, one-time, or recurring—is greatly appreciated!
Thanks to DigitalOcean for providing hosting credits for Vale Studio.
Thanks to Appwrite for supporting Vale through their Open Source Sponsorship program.
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Support for markup: Vale has a rich understanding of many markup formats, allowing it to avoid syntax-related false positives and intelligently exclude code snippets from prose-related rules.
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A highly customizable extension system: Vale is capable of enforcing your style—be it a standard editorial style guide or a custom in-house set of rules (such as those created by GitLab, Homebrew, Linode, CockroachDB, and Spotify).
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Easy-to-install, stand-alone binaries: Unlike other tools, Vale doesn't require you to install and configure a particular programming language and its related tooling (such as Python/pip or Node.js/npm).
See the documentation for more information.
NOTE: While all of the options listed below are open-source (CLI-based) linters for prose, their implementations and features vary significantly. And so, the "best" option will depends on your specific needs and preferences.
| Tool | Extensible | Checks | Supports Markup | Built With | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vale | Yes (via YAML) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, XML, Org) | Go | MIT |
| textlint | Yes (via JavaScript) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, Re:VIEW) | JavaScript | MIT |
| RedPen | Yes (via Java) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, Textile, Re:VIEW, and LaTeX) | Java | Apache-2.0 |
| write-good | Yes (via JavaScript) | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |
| proselint | No | style | No | Python | BSD 3-Clause |
| Joblint | No | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |
| alex | No | style | Yes (Markdown) | JavaScript | MIT |
The exact definition of "Supports Markup" varies by tool but, in general, it means that the format is understood at a higher level than a regular plain-text file (for example, features like excluding code blocks from spell check).
Extensibility means that there's a built-in means of creating your own rules without modifying the original source code.
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This benchmark has all three tools configured to use their implementations of the write-good rule set and Unix-style output.
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This benchmark runs Vale's implementation of proselint's rule set against the original. Both tools are configured to use JSON output. |
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| This benchmark runs Vale's implementation of Joblint's rule set against the original. Both tools are configured to use JSON output. | This benchmark has all three tools configured to perform only English spell checking using their default output styles. |
All benchmarking was performed using the open-source hyperfine tool on a MacBook Pro (2.9 GHz Intel Core i7):
hyperfine --warmup 3 '<command>'
The corpus IDs in the above plots—gitlab and ydkjs—correspond to the following files:
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A snapshot of GitLab's open-source documentation (1,500 Markdown files).
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A chapter from the open-source book You Don't Know JS.
