Spelling
You notice that in your Rust project, often times spelling errors make it through code reviews because they are not specifically looking for them. This leads to a lot of small follow-up pull requests only to fix obvious spelling errors. Sometimes, they are not detected before a new version is released, leading to spelling issues in the public documentation. How could spelling errors be detected automatically so they do not make it in?
Using a spell checker for a software projects helps ensure that no silly
mistakes make it into the main branch, without taking resources from
processes such as code review that better focus on the semantics of the change.
Good communication is very valuable. Nothing is worse in a complex project than having a situation where certain parts are only understood by a select few people due to a lack of documentation. Having good documentation helps keep projects agile by allowing faster onboarding of new developers and by helping existing developers understand unfamiliar parts of a project. See the Documentation section of this book for more information.
There is one crate in the Rust ecosystem that is specifically designed
to detect spelling errors: typos-cli.
typos-cli
The typos-cli1 crate helps do just that by providing a spell
checker specifically for Rust projects. It is designed to be fast enough to run
on monorepos and have a low false positive rate so that it can be run for pull
requests.
It can be installed using Cargo:
cargo install typos-cli
Once installed, it can be run against a project:
typos
If it detects a spelling error, it outputs a nonzero exit code and a diagnostic message explaining what the error was and how it could be remedied. This is a good tool to run in a CI job to keep pull requests from containing spelling errors.
GitHub repository: https://github.com/crate-ci/typos