I’ve been writing posts for this site using Vim to write Markdown files. It mostly works great, but I wanted to enable some 21st century features like spell checking. Turns out, it’s pretty easy.

To enable it, run this:

:setlocal spell

Or add this to your .vimrc:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md setlocal spell

Voila! Spelling errors will be highlighted.

To add a word to your dictionary, move your cursor over the word and enter zg; to undo enter zw. (z-good and z-wrong is my mnemonic.)

To get spelling suggestions, move your cursor over the word and enter z=.

There’s more info in the docs but that did it for me! Beware, this might be a problem for your 1980s computer:

Thus this uses a lot of memory (1 Mbyte or more).