If you write long, literary text (like end-user documentation) in Spanish and/or Galician, and Vim 7 is your editor of choice, you may want to download the spell checker dictionaries for those languages. To use them, drop the files under ~/.vim/spell. (By the way, you may need to create the directory if needed).

To use the dictionaries, just type in the needed Ex command, e.g. for Galician that would be:

  :set spell spelllang=gl

If you use modelines in your text files, you may want to add those settings there as well. That makes an easy way to choose a different language for each file. Also, do not forget to take a look at the spell checker documentation to learn more about it (tip: some keybindings are really useful).

Note that you will only be able of editing UTF-8 texts. I have not crafted ISO-8859-1 versions of the dictionary tables because no single person should be using an encoding different from UTF-8 nowadays (for a number of good reasons). If someone has a strong need for ISO-encoded tables, please let me know.

Last but not least, let me stress that the dictionaries were converted from the ones used by OpenOffice.org plus some small patches I took from the Vim SVN repository. Big thanks go to the all the people working in both projects. I am not an expert with legal stuff, but as the source files are under the LGPL I think it is safe to assume that the Spanish and Galician dictionaries generated from them are LGPL’d, too.

Remember: it is always good to deliver well-written documents. Happy 2010 ;-)