Vim Spell Checking: Regional Variations, Special Languages, and File Loading

too. REGIONS A word may be spelled differently in various regions. For example, English comes in (at least) these variants: en all regions en_au Australia en_ca Canada en_gb Great Britain en_nz New Zealand en_us USA Words that are not used in one region but are used in another region are highlighted with SpellLocal |hl-SpellLocal|. Always use lowercase letters for the language and region names. When adding a word with |zg| or another command it's always added for all regions. You can change that by manually editing the 'spellfile'. See |spell-wordlist-format|. Note that the regions as specified in the files in 'spellfile' are only used when all entries in 'spelllang' specify the same region (not counting files specified by their .spl name). *spell-german* Specific exception: For German these special regions are used: de all German words accepted de_de old and new spelling de_19 old spelling de_20 new spelling de_at Austria de_ch Switzerland *spell-russian* Specific exception: For Russian these special regions are used: ru all Russian words accepted ru_ru "IE" letter spelling ru_yo "YO" letter spelling *spell-yiddish* Yiddish requires using "utf-8" encoding, because of the special characters used. If you are using latin1 Vim will use transliterated (romanized) Yiddish instead. If you want to use transliterated Yiddish with utf-8 use "yi-tr". In a table: 'encoding' 'spelllang' utf-8 yi Yiddish latin1 yi transliterated Yiddish utf-8 yi-tr transliterated Yiddish *spell-cjk* Chinese, Japanese and other East Asian characters are normally marked as errors, because spell checking of these characters is not supported. If 'spelllang' includes "cjk", these characters are not marked as errors. This is useful when editing text with spell checking while some Asian words are present. SPELL FILES *spell-load* Vim searches for spell files in the "spell" subdirectory of the directories in 'runtimepath'. The name is: LL.EEE.spl, where: LL the language name EEE the value of 'encoding' The value for "LL" comes from 'spelllang', but excludes the region name. Examples: 'spelllang' LL ~ en_us en en-rare en-rare medical_ca medical Only the first file is loaded, the one that is first in 'runtimepath'. If this succeeds then additionally files with the name LL.EEE.add.spl are loaded. All the ones that are found are used. If no spell file is found the |SpellFileMissing| autocommand event is triggered. This may trigger the |spellfile.vim| plugin to offer you downloading the spell file. Additionally, the files related to the names in 'spellfile' are loaded. These are the files that |zg| and |zw| add good and wrong words to. Exceptions: - Vim uses "latin1" when 'encoding' is "iso-8859-15". The euro sign doesn't matter for spelling. - When no spell file for 'encoding' is found "ascii" is tried. This only works for languages where nearly all words are ASCII, such as English. It helps when 'encoding' is not "latin1", such as iso-8859-2, and English text is being edited. For the ".add" files the same name as the found main spell file is used. For example, with these values: 'runtimepath' is "~/.config/nvim,/usr/share/nvim/runtime/,~/.config/nvim/after" 'encoding' is "iso-8859-2" 'spelllang' is "pl" Vim will look for: 1. ~/.config/nvim/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.spl 2. /usr/share/nvim/runtime/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.spl 3. ~/.config/nvim/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl 4. /usr/share/nvim/runtime/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl 5. ~/.config/nvim/after/spell/pl.iso-8859-2.add.spl This assumes 1. is not found and 2. is found. If 'encoding' is "latin1" Vim will look for: 1. ~/.config/nvim/spell/pl.latin1.spl 2. /usr/share/nvim/runtime/spell/pl.latin1.spl 3. ~/.config/nvim/after/spell/pl.latin1.spl 4. ~/.config/nvim/spell/pl.ascii.spl 5. /usr/share/nvim/runtime/spell/pl.ascii.spl 6. ~/.config/nvim/after/spell/pl.ascii.spl This assumes none of them are

This section expands on spell checking in Vim, focusing on regional variations for languages like English, German, and Russian. It also discusses considerations for Yiddish, requiring UTF-8 encoding, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters are handled. It details the process of how Vim locates and loads spell files based on 'runtimepath', 'encoding', and 'spelllang', including the use of `.spl` and `.add.spl` files, and the SpellFileMissing event triggered when no spell file is found.