{"slug": "vale-linter-for-prose", "title": "Vale: Linter for Prose", "summary": "Vale, a command-line linter for prose developed solely by Joseph Kato, offers fast, cross-platform linting for spelling and style across multiple markup formats, with extensibility via YAML and an MIT license. The tool is available as an open-source binary that does not require a programming language setup, and it is sponsored by Mintlify and DigitalOcean, with hosting credits provided by DigitalOcean for Vale Studio.", "body_md": "**Vale** is a command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose. It's ** fast**,\n\n**cross-platform**(Windows, macOS, and Linux), and\n\n**highly customizable**.\n\nTip\n\n**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.\n\nHi there! I'm\n\n[@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!\n\n|\nMintlify |\n\nAn AI-native documentation platform built for developers.\n\nShips Vale as a built-in CI check.\n\n**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\n\n[vale.sh].\n\nThanks to\n\n[DigitalOcean]for providing hosting credits for[Vale Studio].\n\n[Deploy now on DigitalOcean](https://m.do.co/c/dc0864bb87fd) and get $200 in free credits!\n\n-\n**Support for markup**: Vale has a rich understanding of many[markup formats](https://docs.vale.sh/formats), allowing it to avoid syntax-related false positives and intelligently exclude code snippets from prose-related rules. -\nA\n\n**highly customizable**[extension system](https://docs.vale.sh/topics/styles): Vale is capable of enforcing*your style*—be it a standard[editorial style guide](https://vale.sh/explorer)or a custom in-house set of rules (see[examples](https://vale.sh/#adopters)). -\n**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).\n\nSee the [documentation](https://vale.sh) for more information.\n\nNOTE: 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.\n\n| Tool | Extensible | Checks | Supports Markup | Built With | License |\n|---|---|---|---|---|---|\n| Vale | Yes (via YAML) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, XML, Org) | Go | MIT |\n| textlint | Yes (via JavaScript) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, Re:VIEW) | JavaScript | MIT |\n| RedPen | Yes (via Java) | spelling, style | Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, Textile, Re:VIEW, and LaTeX) | Java | Apache-2.0 |\n| write-good | Yes (via JavaScript) | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |\n| proselint | No | style | No | Python | BSD 3-Clause |\n| Joblint | No | style | No | JavaScript | MIT |\n| alex | No | style | Yes (Markdown) | JavaScript | MIT |\n\nThe 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).\n\nExtensibility means that there's a built-in means of creating your own rules without modifying the original source code.\n\nAll benchmarking was performed using the open-source [hyperfine](https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine) tool on a MacBook Pro (2.9 GHz Intel Core i7):\n\n```\nhyperfine --warmup 3 '<command>'\n```\n\nThe corpus IDs in the above plots—`gitlab`\n\nand `ydkjs`\n\n—correspond to the following files:", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vale-linter-for-prose", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/vale-cli/vale", "published_at": "2026-08-23 08:00:02+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-23 08:13:51.150757+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools"], "entities": ["Vale", "Joseph Kato", "Mintlify", "DigitalOcean", "Vale Studio", "GitHub Sponsors", "Open Collective"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vale-linter-for-prose", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vale-linter-for-prose.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vale-linter-for-prose.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vale-linter-for-prose.jsonld"}}