Disable Vale.Spelling; enforce house style only#7
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The spell-checker arrived with the base Vale style and flags an endless tail of valid tool/package names on technical docs with no typo-catching benefit worth the vocab-curation toil. Keep the curated PaperMoon house-style rules plus Vale.Repetition and Vale.Terms. Adopting repos inherit this as the default house behavior.
eshaben
approved these changes
Jun 1, 2026
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Summary
Disable
Vale.Spellingin the canonical.vale.iniso the styleguide enforces house style, not spelling.Vale.Spelling = NOWhy
Vale.Spelling(Hunspell) arrived for free with the baseValestyle. On technical documentation it flags an endless tail of valid tool and package names —npm,dev,toolchain,Turbopack, etc. — as misspellings, with no meaningful typo-catching benefit to offset the ongoing vocab-curation toil.This came up downstream in polkadot-developers/polkadot-docs#1678: a reviewer started a thread collecting words Vale was flagging locally (
dev,devtools,npm,toolchain,Turbopack,PWallet) — all valid terms, allVale.Spellingfalse positives. We disabled it there; this proposes making it the canonical default so every adopting repo inherits the right behavior instead of rediscovering the noise and overriding locally.The curated PaperMoon house-style rules plus
Vale.RepetitionandVale.Termsstay enabled — those are the point of the styleguide.Tradeoff
Genuine prose typos are no longer caught by Vale and rely on review. On a heavily technical corpus that's a worthwhile trade given the false-positive rate.
Note on propagation
.vale.iniis not synced by adopters (the sync script copies onlystyles/PaperMoon/*.ymland the PaperMoon vocab). So this doesn't auto-propagate — it sets a better default for new repos copying this config as their template, and aligns the styleguide repo's own linting with that default.