website/content/blog/vale-linter-human-prose.md
2024-11-26 21:03:48 -05:00

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---
title: "Linting my blog posts with Vale"
date: 2024-11-27T16:29:30-05:00
draft: false
tags: []
math: false
medium_enabled: false
---
How do you write *good*?
For some, the answer is Grammarly. This, however, falls short to me for the following reasons:
- Needing to rely on some third party service. Seriously, what if I want to draft my blog posts without Internet?
- Not configurable. Leave me alone, sometimes I like writing **my way**.
- Where's my beautiful terminal application?
I use [Vale](https://vale.sh/) ([GitHub](https://github.com/errata-ai/vale)) a linter for human prose. It runs locally on my computer ✔, is configurable by defining a rule set ✔, and offers not only a beautiful CLI application ✔, but even offers integrations to editors like VSCode.
To provide useful feedback, we'll need a strong collection of rules. Like a crazy person, I went onto the [Vale package hub](https://vale.sh/hub/) and looked at the rules of many different packages and compiled the ones I liked into [my own package](https://github.com/brandon-rozek/vale) for us to use.
All we need to do is specify the package in our Vale config. To see where this lives, you can run `vale ls-dirs`. For example, on my computer it is at `~/.config/vale/.vale.ini`
```ini
StylesPath = /home/rozek/.local/share/vale/styles
Vocab = brozek
MinAlertLevel = suggestion
Packages = https://github.com/Brandon-Rozek/vale/releases/download/0.1.0/brozek.zip
[*]
BasedOnStyles = Vale, brozek
```
By default, Vale includes a spell-checker. As a technical writer, I often talk about products which Vale claims are typos. We can force Vale to not complain by creating a [Vocabulary](https://vale.sh/docs/topics/vocab/) (fancy word for dictionary).
`<StylesPath>/config/vocabularies/brozek/accept.txt`
```
BTRFS
[Bb]oolean
systemd
Zulip
```
These vocabularies are case-sensitive, which while may seen like a weird choice, I find useful in keeping capitalization consistent. To specify that something is not case sensitive you'll need to put square brackets around the upper and lower-case letter. For example, case-insensitive b is `[Bb]`.
With all this configured, we can then sync the configuration rules to our machine.
```bash
vale sync
```
Then, lint a blog post!
```bash
vale vale-linter-human-prose.md
```
```
vale-linter-human-prose.md
14:48 warning Remove 'Seriously' if it's not brozek.Adverbs
important to the meaning of
the statement.
20:70 suggestion Try to keep sentences short (< brozek.SentenceLength
30 words).
48:91 warning Remove 'really' if it's not brozek.Adverbs
important to the meaning of
the statement.
```
From there you can choose which suggestions to keep and which to ignore ;)