How to Vim: Fixing Typos

Here’s another small Vim tip - how to deal with typos quickly. Generally, most people do something along those lines:

• enable :spell (the built-in spell-checking)
• use [s and ]s to move between the previous/next misspelled word
• correct the typo with z= or 1z=

It’s a pretty sound approach overall and there’s nothing wrong with it. Still, because I see the typos I make as I’m typing when the spell-checker is enabled, I think there are two other reasonable ways to approach the problem at hand:

1. If you’re a fast touch typist you can just C-w to delete the preceding word and retype it from scratch. Using C-h for single-letter corrections is fine as well, of course.
2. Use C-x C-s to immediately trigger smart completion for the last misspelled word, using suggestions from your spelling dictionary.

I use both of those approaches as type, but most often I lean towards 2), as for longer words it’s a bit more efficient.

By the way, here’s my spell-checking configuration:

autocmd FileType asciidoc,markdown,text setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

Sadly, unlike some other editors you can’t use Vim to spellcheck only code comments (in Emacs that’s easily achieved with flyspell-prog-mode), so I limit the use of :spell to text types I’m working often with (e.g. Markdown).

Funny enough, I had to use the advice I shared in this post several times while writing it. I hope that no typos made it in the final version!

That’s all I have for you today! Keep hacking!