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Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim
- runevault 4y agoHuh never seen this before or managed to forget it exists. Also looks like it does have a VSCode plugin for those of us who don't wanna fight with Vim. Tempted to try it with the write-good linter and see what it says about some of my novel prose.
- mempko 4y agoThis is really cool. Never heard of vale until today. Is there a vim plugin that can take advantage of it? I don't use neovim and never plan to.
- alpaca128 4y agoA quick search got me `vim-compiler-vale`, which seems to do exactly that.
- aidenn0 4y agovim-ale[1] combines a LSP client with the ability to shell out to linters and supports vale 1: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-tools.md https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-...
- tombert 4y agoOut of curiosity, and this isn't meant to be passive aggressive or anything, but why the resistance to NeoVim?
- joemi 4y agoI'm not the person you asked, but in my case it's mostly a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" situation. I don't need neovim since vim is just fine for me. There are a few neovim-only plugins I wouldn't mind trying out sometime, but I don't need them, and I use very few plugins so they probably wouldn't make the cut for me anyway. And there aren't any neovim-only features I care about (besides mild interest in a few plugins). That's what most of my personal "resistance" is about. The rest is due to fact that I'm still a little bitter from some bad interactions with some early neovim developers and fans.
- teruakohatu 4y agoI have an old vim config that I haven't had motivation to switch over to Neovim. I find configuration frameworks, which are so popular right now, a lot of work to understand and not very flexible/opinionated. Lastly, vim is usually available everywhere, so I am just a git clone away from having my configuration deployed.
- halostatue 4y agoThere’s no good replacement for gvim / MacVim. I’ve tried all the GUIs that compile for the Mac. I can’t stand a single one of them. I can’t stand using vim / nvim on the terminal for most of my editing. Not sure why, but that’s my reasoning.
- jcoder 4y agoThis seems interesting, but given that the recommendations in the very first screenshot are >50% “wrong” (“HOW” is not an acronym, “tap” makes no sense in this context), I can only imagine that using this tool would be a huge distraction while writing.
- leephillips 4y agoIn fact, all the recommendations in the screenshot are wrong or useless. This is the example they chose to showcase the awesomeness of this software? Amazing.
- skrebbel 4y agoIt has been demonstrated that you're entirely out of tap if you can't imagine Home Office Weekly this could be useful.
- nmilo 4y agoAvoid second-person pronouns such as "you're".
- ryanklee 4y agoYeah, this is not good at all. Even something arguably well-executed and compatible with "established" style heuristics, like Grammarly, will always be dubious, as they perpetuate the myth of linguistic prescriptivism weaponized by language pedants. All of whom are annoyingly, vocally, interminably incorrect. But this, this is just baldly idiotic.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 4y agoThey have rules loaded that are primarily for writing technical documentation. (I assume the tap/touch is from the Google rules). Most technical documentaition style guides will recommend avoiding first person, but that makes zero sense for e.g. a blog post. Assuming ALL CAPS words are likely to be acronyms is also reasonable in such a context. Vale also has multiple severity levels, so disabling e.g. the "suggestion" (and maybe even "warning") level while writing live would make a lot of sense.
- groby_b 4y agoPretty much every recommendation in the example screenshot is nonsense. I strongly suggest learning to write better instead of relying on this. There are writing classes. There are teachers. There are editors. And if all of that is too expensive for you, ask friends and colleagues for feedback. Relying on algorithms to improve your style is at best a no-op, and at worst actively harmful to good writing.
- andrewflnr 4y agoIMO one of the best ways to improve your writing is just to read a metric crapload of good writing so it seeps in to you.
- tombert 4y agoAnother thing is to not be afraid rewriting. Usually when I write an essay/paper, I take a short break after the first draft, and then go through, re-read it, and make major changes to the wording/structure in the process. Generally, the first revision is substantially better than the draft, and the second revision is substantially better than the first revision. There's no law saying that you have to get all of your phrasing and flow perfect the first time around.
- andrewflnr 4y agoQuite the opposite, basically no one gets it exactly right the first time, and if you're trying to you're probably doing it wrong. I forget the attribution but there's a famous quote: "Writing is rewriting."
- lijogdfljk 4y agoThis is neat, any other projects similar? Notably ones that work perhaps with more of an LSP-like API? Not sure if it makes sense as an LSP, but if it was i could hook it into my editor of choice (Helix, at the time of writing) easily
- guessmyname 4y ago> This is neat, any other projects similar? Notably ones that work perhaps with more of an LSP-like API? https://valentjn.github.io/ltex/ https://valentjn.github.io/ltex/
- ComputerGuru 4y agoThe answer to writing better isn’t a “static code completion/linting tool, but for English.” Leave it to the tech industry to really exemplify the “when all you have is a hammer…” mentality.
- d0mine 4y agoAny activity has boring aspects. Using the tool to automate such things should be encouraged. Obviously, linters can produce many false positives--they shouldn't be used blindly.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoI can see where you’re coming from but I don’t believe something like Vale will - in practice, not in theory - actually do that. You would need a general purpose AI to pull that off, otherwise domain-specific, bespoke, one-off tools (eg to transform an API into a documentation template, to make skeleton release notes out of git/GitHub/Jira/whatever records, etc) combined with a two-hour crash course on effective writing are probably the way to go. But obviously enough people disagree that this is a thing.. although that could be said for quite a number of “technical progress” milestones we currently celebrate.
- vorpalhex 4y agoSometimes tools that seem to help us make us more reckless. I wonder if tools like grammarly have this problem..
- rojobuffalo 4y agoboredom is useful to a writer. a lot of my favorite writers have mentioned writing all first drafts with pen and paper. what happens in your brain when you're writing is important, even when it feels boring, slow, or repetitive. who has a better sense of where my attention should be, me or a tool? imo better writing is the product of practice, reading, and better thinking. all of that to say, if you have a pre-publishing step where you need to check spelling, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, etc. a linter might fit in at that step. but i really don't think a tool is better than your own reading or giving it to an editor you trust.
- adamgordonbell 4y agoThey don't mention that you can write the rules yourself and also pick and choose from existing rules from GitHub. There is an attempt to build and open source version of Grammarly using vale rules here[1]. Rules are mainly regex based, but some target readability measures[2] or use parts of speech[3]. [1]: https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly [2]: https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly/blob/master/Openly/Readability.yml https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly/blob/master/Openly/Rea... [3]: https://github.com/errata-ai/vale/issues/356 https://github.com/errata-ai/vale/issues/356
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoI’ve always been hesitant to use a service which ships thing’s I write back to home base. Instead I used Microsoft word, which turns out does similar.
- dijit 4y agoScathing accusation. Is there a citation? I won’t use another office product from them if so. Seriously.
- AlanYx 4y agoYou can see Grammarly's statement on the matter here: https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003816032-Is-Grammarly-a-keylogger https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003816032... When enabled, it does basically send every keystroke to the mothership except in some fields on webpages and on mobile apps marked sensitive. However, they do have what seems like a solid privacy policy in how they handle the data they receive.
- bachmeier 4y ago> However, they do have what seems like a solid privacy policy in how they handle the data they receive. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but that provides no comfort at all. The best privacy policy is to not have access to your data.
- andrewflnr 4y agoAh, so not related to Vale the programming language, https://vale.dev/ https://vale.dev/, which IMO is much more interesting.
- LionTamer 4y agoJust discovered the Vale programming language for the first time thanks to your link - looks pretty interesting. I’ve been meaning to learn a new language that is (a) simple (or if not simple, at least elegant enough to make the lack of simplicity worthwhile) (b) type-safe & performant. I was between Nim & Zig but might need to give Vale a shot.
- andrewflnr 4y agoTo be fair, Vale is in a much earlier stage of development than either of the others you mentioned.
- triyambakam 4y agoTab9 is an ML powered completion engine that works for code and prose. It won't help you write better but it is very good at suggesting word I was about to use next.
- gnuvince 4y agoA post about writing means that I need to plug a couple talks by Larry McEnerney. [1,2] The tool described in this blog post is all about text-based rules: what the _text_ ought to look like. To improve your own writing (a) learn who your readers are, (b) know what they value, and (c) write so that as readers, they find your work valuable to them. [1] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM [2] https://youtu.be/aFwVf5a3pZM https://youtu.be/aFwVf5a3pZM
- Semiapies 4y agoOnly if you consider it worthwhile to spam with links about agile development in discussions of linters. Writing, like programming, is a task that involves work at multiple levels.
- remoquete 4y agoAs a technical writer, I use Vale every day. It helps protect consistency and style. I wrote a brief tutorial here: https://passo.uno/posts/first-steps-with-the-vale-prose-linter/ https://passo.uno/posts/first-steps-with-the-vale-prose-lint...
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThank you for this - an example of the config made it all so much clearer - I would recommended the author steal some of that post for their README To over-simplify, vale runs hundreds of pre-built regexes that suggest changes to over-used phrases, likely function names etc etc. Google etc have pre-built fairly good defaults I suspect. (To be fair this is trying to get consistency across huge document bases, and will never replace a human's authentic voice for communication. But sometimes you just want to make sure there are the same number of blueberries in each muffin) Ok - my mission after next - get something like this brought in at work
- remoquete 4y agoFeel free to reach out to me if you need some ideas. I brought it to work successfully and I’m now trying to get the rules to go open source.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThank you - I could not find your details in your profile - my email is in my profile so please feel free to ping me :-)
- nagisa 4y agoI tried running vale with the good-writing plugin on one of my blog posts. I won’t claim I produce great literary works, but a fair bit of warnings it output were false positives. Even conjugates such as “write-only” would trigger its weasel word trigger for “only”. Ultimately, it is the technical limitations that make the tool unusable for me. On one hand, a Github-flavoured markdown parser is used. It filters out some obscure HTML tags such as `mathp`, and I couldn’t find a way to configure the tool so it would ignore the math segments. I even tried to forgo vale’s built-in markdown converter, and run the check on the output of the static site generator instead, but that plan was quickly foiled by the soft hyphens my generator inserts. Given such an input vale considers every syllable a separate word.
- lyjackal 4y agoregex based prose linting seems rife with opportunities to write buggy regexes
- henning 4y ago> Vale requires to have a .vale.ini config file Having to provide a configuration file for every little fucking thing and completely refusing to have any set of reasonable defaults when you install a package is the worst part of Neovim.
- nathias 4y agoI had a linter for text, it kept coloring 'black' as offensive so I uninstalled it.
- user3939382 4y agoIt feels weird to me to read/write prose in monospaced fonts.
- Semiapies 4y agoI'm comfortable writing prose in monospaced fonts, but I tend to switch out for reading and revising. In Emacs, I just hit variable-pitch-mode.
- user3939382 4y agoI just learned that my IDE, PhpStorm from Jetbrains, comes bundled with a plugin called Grazie which wraps vale. So you may have been using this and not even realize it.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago>Installing vale >Download a latest version of vale from their github releases page. Looks like Vale took a break in this section.
- FastMonkey 4y agoIf you want to improve your writing, even technical writing, I'd recommend reading more books. Classics, sci-fi, whatever floats your boat. Blog posts and news are meant for consuming a point or two in a few paragraphs. Reading a book means really letting a writers style sink into your mind. It'll eventually bleed into your own writing.
- kingofpandora 4y ago> The null-ls.nvim neovim plugin let’s you use vale as a prose linter. Not exactly selling the value of vale when I see "let's" used like this.
- patrakov 4y agoIs there any equivalent for any other human language?