Typos used to work but now does not find spelling errors; i.e. is broken

[bradbell]

Typos was working great, but now if I execute typos I often do not get a spelling error when I think I should ?

I have tried removing and reinstalling typos using cargo, but this has not fixed the problem. The following script demonstrates the problem:

! /usr/bin/env bash
set -e -u
if [ -e typos_question ]
then
   rm -r typos_question
fi
mkdir typos_question
cd typos_question
cat << EOF > main.rs
// This is a spellerr
fn main() {
   println!( "This is another spelerr" );
}
EOF
echo 'Execute: typos'
typos 
echo 'Execute: typos --identifiers;'
typos --identifiers

When I execute this script I get the following output:

Execute: typos
Execute: typos --identifiers;
main
rs
This
is
a
spellerr
fn
main
println
This
is
another
spelerr

[epage]

If I ran typos on your main.rs, then nothing is reported. If I edit it to add hte, then that gets reported as a typo.

From our FAQ Entry Why was ... not corrected?

If it is showing up, likely typos doesn't know about it yet.

typos maintains a list of known typo corrections to keep the false positive count low so it can safely run unassisted.

This is in contrast to most spell checking UIs people use where there is a known list of valid words. In this case, the spell checker tries to guess your intent by finding the closest-looking word. It then has a gauge for when a word isn't close enough and assumes you know best. The user has the opportunity to verify these corrections and explicitly allow or reject them.

[bradbell]

If I change This is a spellerr to This is hte spellerr , I get detection of hte as an error.

My original spelling error that made me thing typos was broken was 'recoerd' . I seem to permute letters more often than other people. Is there some way I can add to the list of typos.

[epage]

You can add your own corrections in the config using extend-words or extend-identifiers.

You can also request additions to typos in #1309.

[bradbell]

As an aside, I understand the false positive problem. When I designed a documentation system with a spell checker, I allowed for an exception list at the top of each page to get around this problem (so that the user did not have to repeatedly accept the same error).