Visual Studio Code for prose

4.1 cSpell

The most popular seems to be cspell a.k.a. codespell, which is VERY EXCITED about GETTING CODE SPELLING RIGHT including SPELLCHECKING VARIABLE NAMES, which is a low priority for me personally but whatevs.

Pro

It works fine with no messing around.

Con

It keeps my user dictionary in my settings which results in massive settings files.

4.2 Spellright

Aesthetically I prefer SpellRight as far as system spellcheck integration. Developer Bartosz Antosik is incredibly responsive.

Pro

Works with system dictionaries

Con:

System dictionary support is more complicated than I would hope.

It is too aggressive with spellchecking markup in markdown.

Clashes with the LaTeX extension.

Here is a workaround I whipped up, to put in the settings file:

    "spellright.ignoreRegExpsByClass": {
        "markdown": [
            "/@[A-Za-z0-9_]+/g", //citations
            // "/```(.+?)```/gm", // code blocks - does not work.
            "/`[^`]+`/g", // code inline
        ],
    },

On Ubuntu I need hunspell dictionaries installed. NB it was not sufficient to install hunspell; I needed to download or link the files into the right place for the extension to find them, in the correct character encoding.

To use it a pair of Dictionary (*.dic) and Affixes (*.aff) files with UTF-8 encoding have to be downloaded … and placed in Dictionaries subfolder of VSCode’s user global configuration directory, located at $HOME/.config/Code/Dictionaries/.

Hunspell dictionaries are not obvious, entailing e.g. character set weirdness. I can create my own language if you want, so that’s nice I suppose. More usefully for most of us, can create my own user dictionary, or add to it using hunspell commands but it’s not clear to me if VS Code will pick these up.

You know what? After all that I think I have persuaded myself that this is not quite the right way to do things. There is another alternative

4.3 LT_EX

LTEX:

LT_EX – Grammar/Spell Checker Using LanguageTool with Support for L^AT_EX, Markdown, and Others

LT_EX provides offline grammar checking of various markup languages using LanguageTool (LT). LT_EX can be used standalone as a command-line tool, as a language server using the Language Server Protocol (LSP), or directly in various editors using extensions.

LT_EX currently supports BibT_EX, ConT_EXt, L^AT_EX, Markdown, Org, reStructuredText, R Sweave, and XHTML documents.

The difference to regular spell checkers is that LT_EX not only detects spelling errors, but also many grammar and stylistic errors…

A classic use case of LT_EX is checking scientific L^AT_EX papers, but why not check your next blog post, book chapter, or long e-mail before you send it to someone else?

The java ltex server is memory-heavy; I recommend not enabling this extension globally but only when editing an actual LaTeX document.

5.1 Browser preview

If I’m doing e.g academic blogging, my site previewer already has robust preview in the browser. It is simple and robust and I currently recommend it. It is not fast, but then neither are the alternatives.

Pros:

Supports everything the blog itself supports

Breaks in the same way that the blog itself will break when something goes wrong instead of exotic local ways

Cons:

Need to manually launch browser preview

Slow, although hard to say if it is actually slower than the alternatives.

5.2 Native “Markdown + Math”

You can augment native markdown preview with maths support via Markdown + Math a.k.a. mdmath.

Pros:

Renders math faster using KaTeX

well integrated with everything else

Cons:

mdmath KaTeX macro support is quirky, as the underlying KaTeX macro support is in turn quirky. Further, to detect macro updates you need to close and open the window again.

The parser is bad at identifying delimiters — in particular,

• There must be a blank line before display math and some kind of whitespace after it. (😱) If I generate LaTeX from the markdown, there will be semantically-incorrect paragraphs before each equation.
• No newlines in inline math (😬)
• No spaces between delimiter and math (😐)

5.3 Markdown preview enhanced

Replace native markdown preview with the revamped Markdown Preview Enhanced.

Pros:

Just works

Supports MathJax and hence LaTeX-native macros

Cons (at least when using MathJax):

Slow, presumably due to MathJax being slow

leaks RAM

eventually crashes