Adding and improving a CSpell config for content spellchecking

[bsmth]

Hi all, I believe the topic of spellchecking has come up many times - this is difficult because of how many files we have, the number of coding languages we are working with and custom text we use, such as macros. If you run cspell over the project without any configuration, the output is completely unmanageable.

I've been using a local cspell config over the last few months, finding appropriate dictionaries (lorem-ipsum etc.) occasionally and I think we can slowly start working with it unobtrusively at the authoring stage.

Proposal for now:

• Check in a cspell config that we can use in IDEs and from the CLI
• Incrementally build out the project dictionary and patterns as we go by accepting some additions to the cspell config in parallel to regular PRs as we work on one or two files.

Out of scope:

• 🚧 spellcheck in CI (this topic is too busy at the moment)
• 📈 sweeping pull requests in folders across many files
• 🏆 Get down to 0 cspell errors in the next X weeks

I've opened a PR now that can get the ball rolling on this https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/28487/files. It contains:

.vscode/cspell.json.       # the spellchecker config (dictionaries, ignore patterns)
.vscode/project-words.txt  # custom words we want the spellchecker to ignore

We may need to occasionally accept/ignore changes to these two files in content PRs going forward, but I hope that's acceptable.

Using cspell

From the terminal, it looks like:

# install if you don't have it
npm install -g cspell@latest

# run against a directory
cspell lint --no-progress --unique --config .vscode/cspell.json ./files/en-us/web/accessibility

Looking at IDE support in VSCode, for example, spellchecking and adding unknown words to a project dictionary is quite good via quick-fix (command + .)

Or in the problems panel:

Let me know what you think!

[dipikabh]

Thanks @bsmth. I think this is a good start and a good disclaimer to rule out the things that are out of scope at the moment 👍. At the minimum, we do need to run the spell checker locally (from the CLI or IDE).
Do we need to worry about the impact on translated content as a result of these changes?

[bsmth]

Do we need to worry about the impact on translated content as a result of these changes?

Not that I'm aware of, it should just help us catch typos in mdn/content as we're making edits, mostly.