Vale is an open source tool that lets you check your writing against a set of styles. Unfortunately, it’s a command-line tool, which forces you out of your text editor. There are clients for VSCode, Atom, and Sublime Text, but none for Obsidian—until now!
The plugin includes support for both Vale Server (paid) and Vale CLI (free).
This is my first plugin, so I’m hoping for some beta testers before submitting it to the official repository. I’ll also be working on better onboarding resources. Right now, the best resources are the official Vale docs.
Let me know how it works for you, and what I can do to improve it!
A big thank-you to those who’ve tried out the plugin so far and shared their feedback!
The most common feedback I’ve received so far has been related to Vale itself. Specifically, Vale can be difficult to configure for a first-time user. The latest release, v0.4.2, aims to make it easier for people who haven’t used Vale before.
The plugin now ships with a basic .vale.ini configuration file with basic spellchecking enabled by default. That means that you only need to have the vale binary, which you can download from their release page.
Install/uninstall styles: You can now download styles from the Vale style library using the Install style command. The styles will be downloaded relative to the config file, and should work even if you’re managing the config fie yourself.
Enable/disable styles: You can toggle which of your installed styles to use through the Enable style command.
The new release also comes with a set of bug fixes that should improve performance and stability.
I’m really happy about this release. I wish I had this when I started using Vale
This release focuses on improved style management to make it even easier for new users.
Manage styles from the plugin settings tab: Based on feedback, for most users, the distinction between an installed and enabled plugin is likely not that important. Also, rather than enabling styles through commands, managing styles directly from the plugin settings felt more intuitive.
Manage style rules: You can now disable specific rules within a style, or set their severity.
This release now underlines the alerts in the text and offers a two-way sync with the alerts in the side menu. If you click the underlined text in the editor, the corresponding card in the side menu will become highlighted, and vice versa.
This will be the last feature release before I submit the plugin to be published. I’ll be focusing on testing and bug squashing to make 1.0.0 as stable as possible.
Would it be possible to add an option to select different dictionaries (e.g. en_GB)? (This might be especially useful as the built-in spell checker does not support this at the moment).
,
