The first Sherlock Holmes book I read was A Study in Scarlet. I was ten at the time; my mom gave me a copy of Um Estudo em Vermelho, the Brazilian Portuguese translation of A Study in Scarlet. It was 1993. The word “Amazon” only referred to our largest forest or river, not the bookshop that has since become a behemoth. I didn’t even have a computer at home. My first contact with the language of Albion would not occur until the following year; I barely knew how to pronounce the names. Anyway, I was hooked. I loved Holmes’ intelligence and perception, and that sparked the imagination of my younger self, wondering if it would really be possible to deduce facts from small evidence such as mud on a boot (or trainers, I was just a kid). Later, I went to the library and borrowed the remaining books – at least the ones I could find.

I was talking to a few friends about my current English learning situation and shared with them some of the sources I’m using to study. I’m trying to improve my English pronunciation and the accent I chose to learn is the RP accent¹. Sometimes, I take private classes with a teacher using the platform italki [sic], but I also like to watch YouTube videos and that is the reason of this text.

Vim has a built-in spell check that you can enable with :set spell. You can also set the language with :set spelllang= followed by the two-letter code of the language and optionally a dash and the region (e.g., :set spelllang=en or :set spelllang=en-GB).

After enabling the spell checker, you can move between different mistakes with ]s and [s.

I knew about the spell check, I knew Vim highlighted spelling mistakes, and I knew how to move between the mistakes. I usually fix them manually and I never bothered to learn how to make Vim fix them for me. Until today.