Vale is a command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose. It's ** fast**,
cross-platform(Windows, macOS, and Linux), and
highly customizable.
Tip
Try Vale CMS: the hosted authoring layer for Vale. Build and maintain your style guide in the browser -- config, rules, vocabularies, dictionaries, filters, views, and templates -- with the real Vale engine linting live before you ship changes back to your repository.
Hi there! I'm
[@jdkato], the sole developer of Vale. If you'd like to help me dedicate more time todeveloping,documenting, andsupportingVale, feel free to donate through[GitHub Sponsors]or[Open Collective]. Any donation—big, small, one-time, or recurring—is greatly appreciated!
| Mintlify |
An AI-native documentation platform built for developers.
Ships Vale as a built-in CI check.
Promptless Suggests doc updates when your product changes.Runs Vale on every doc its agents write.Sponsors at $1,000 and above get a dedicated page on
[vale.sh].
Thanks to
[DigitalOcean]for providing hosting credits for[Vale Studio].
Deploy now on DigitalOcean and get $200 in free credits!
Support for markup: Vale has a rich understanding of manymarkup formats, allowing it to avoid syntax-related false positives and intelligently exclude code snippets from prose-related rules. - A
highly customizableextension system: Vale is capable of enforcingyour style—be it a standardeditorial style guideor a custom in-house set of rules (seeexamples). - Easy-to-install, stand-alone binaries: Unlike other tools, Vale doesn't require you to install and configure a particular programming language and its related tooling (such as Python/pip or Node.js/npm).
See the documentation for more information.
NOTE: While all of the options listed below are open-source (CLI-based) linters for prose, their implementations and features vary significantly. And so, the "best" option will depends on your specific needs and preferences.
| Tool | Extensible | Checks | Supports Markup | Built With | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vale | Yes (via YAML) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, XML, Org) | Go | MIT |
| textlint | Yes (via JavaScript) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, Re:VIEW) | JavaScript | MIT |
| RedPen | Yes (via Java) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, Textile, Re:VIEW, and LaTeX) | Java | Apache-2.0 |
| write-good | Yes (via JavaScript) | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |
| proselint | No | style | No | Python | BSD 3-Clause |
| Joblint | No | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |
| alex | No | style | Yes (Markdown) | JavaScript | MIT |
The exact definition of "Supports Markup" varies by tool but, in general, it means that the format is understood at a higher level than a regular plain-text file (for example, features like excluding code blocks from spell check).
Extensibility means that there's a built-in means of creating your own rules without modifying the original source code.
All benchmarking was performed using the open-source hyperfine tool on a MacBook Pro (2.9 GHz Intel Core i7):
hyperfine --warmup 3 '<command>'
The corpus IDs in the above plots—gitlab
and ydkjs
—correspond to the following files: