Introduction

Written text is an important component in the process of knowledge acquisition and communication. Poorly written text fails to deliver clear ideas to the reader no matter how revolutionary and ground-breaking these ideas are. Providing text with good writing style is essential to transfer ideas smoothly. While we have sophisticated tools to check for stylistic problems in program code, we do not apply the same techniques for written text. TextLint is a ruled-based tool to check for common style errors in natural language. TextLint provides a structural model of written text and an extensible rule-based checking mechanism.

Watch two screencasts and a presentation to get an overview of TextLint.

TextLint implements various stylistic rules that its authors collected over the years, and that are described in

• The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
• On Writing Well, by William Zinsser

TextLint is a research project of the Software Composition Group (SCG) from the University of Bern (related publications).

TextLint is currently accessible through:

• An Emacs plugin
• A Vim plugin
• A TextMate plugin
• A web interface
• A Smalltalk IDE

Setup instructions for Emacs

With el-get

If you use el-get you are lucky, just add the following recipe:

(:name textlint
    :type git
    :url "git://github.com/DamienCassou/textlint.git"
    :website "http://scg.unibe.ch/research/textlint"
    :description "Allows the integration of TextLint within Emacs"
    :load "textlint.el")

Now you can use TextLint.

Without el-get

If you do not use el-get, download the project archive file from the github project, unzip, update your load-path, and load "textlint.el".

You then have to customize the variables in the textlint group using M-x customize-group RET textlint RET. You at least need to configure textlint-location-textlint.

Now you can use TextLint.

Using TextLint under Emacs

You can now visit a text file and type M-x textlint-run RET. When you see "Compilation finished", you can start using C-x ` to visit the next error message and move to the text that caused it.

Setup instructions for Vim

The recommended installation procedure is to use pathogen or Vundle.

For pathogen, just unzip the textlint archive or checkout the TextLint repository under ~/.vim/bundle.

For Vundle, add this line to your .vimrc, then invoke :BundleInstall in Vim:

Bundle 'DamienCassou/textlint'

Using TextLint under Vim

To invoke TextLint, use the :TextLint command from your text buffer. For convenience, there is a predefined shortcut: <leader>tl. Once TextLint has finished, Vim's quickfix window will open; you can then navigate between TextLint suggestions with the normal :cn and :cp commands. Consult :help quickfix for more details.

Setup instructions for TextMate

Double click on "TextLint.tmbundle" to install TextLint. Open a LaTeX or plain text file and press Ctrl+Shift+V to run TextLint. Alternatively select "Bundles > TextLint > RunText Lint" from the menu.

Support

If you want to report problems do that on the Issues page.

If you want to propose the integration for a new editor or fix an existing integration, please fork the project and start a pull request.

If you want to change the TextLint engine or just have a look at it, get it from the SCG website. Please propose patches by email to the developers.