I’ve been using an external spell-checking plugin for vim for some time now. Today I upgraded my systems to vim-7.0, to do this on Debian Sarge (stable) add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

# Backports  - A "Pin" in preferences file required is to prefer backport pkg.
deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main

And add to /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: vim
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999

Package: vim-common
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999

Then do an apt-get update and apt-get install vim.

Start up vim and do :help spell for full documentation! The first thing you’ll want to know to play with it is turning it on: setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb (for real English, surprisingly it also has en_au). It will highlight unknown words, for suggestions sit the cursor on the word and type z=.

I didn’t see anything immediately obvious in the doco for simple on-off toggling of the spell-check mode. So I knocked up this little bit of vim-code to toggle the spellcheck with Ctrl-i (more obvious combos already taken) for the current buffer (i.e. on/off is maintained independently for each buffer). This is now^W^Wwas in my .vimrc:

" Toggle spell checking for the current buffer
function ToggleSpell()
    if &l:spell
        setlocal nospell
    else
        setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb
    endif
endfunction
map   :call ToggleSpell()
imap   :call ToggleSpell()i

It’s a good thing that vim can spell, because I shore can’t.

Update:

A quick scan of some vim doco moved me to simplify the above toggle to:

" Set spelling language.
set spelllang=en_gb
" Toggle spell checking for the current buffer with Ctrl-i
map   :setlocal invspell
imap   :setlocal invspelli

Duh. 🙂

Update 2:

Silly me, there is a slight problem with binding C-i in vim.