Vale: Your style, our editor

Vale is a command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose. It's fast, cross-platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), and highly customizable.

[!TIP] Try Vale CMS: the hosted authoring layer for Vale. Build and maintain your style guide in the browser -- config, rules, vocabularies, dictionaries, filters, views, and templates -- with the real Vale engine linting live before you ship changes back to your repository.

:heart: Sponsors

Hi there! I'm @jdkato, the sole developer of Vale. If you'd like to help me dedicate more time to developing, documenting, and supporting Vale, feel free to donate through GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective. Any donation—big, small, one-time, or recurring—is greatly appreciated!

Spotlights

Sponsors at $1,000 and above get a dedicated page on vale.sh.

• Mintlify — an AI-native documentation platform built for developers.

Organizations

Other

Thanks to DigitalOcean for providing hosting credits for Vale Studio.

Deploy now on DigitalOcean and get $200 in free credits!

Individuals

:boom: Key Features

• Support for markup: Vale has a rich understanding of many markup formats, allowing it to avoid syntax-related false positives and intelligently exclude code snippets from prose-related rules.

• A highly customizable extension system: Vale is capable of enforcing your style—be it a standard editorial style guide or a custom in-house set of rules (see examples).

• Easy-to-install, stand-alone binaries: Unlike other tools, Vale doesn't require you to install and configure a particular programming language and its related tooling (such as Python/pip or Node.js/npm).

See the documentation for more information.

:mag: At a Glance: Vale vs. <...>

NOTE: While all of the options listed below are open-source (CLI-based) linters for prose, their implementations and features vary significantly. And so, the "best" option will depends on your specific needs and preferences.

Functionality

Tool	Extensible	Checks	Supports Markup	Built With	License
Vale	Yes (via YAML)	spelling, style	Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, XML, Org)	Go	MIT
textlint	Yes (via JavaScript)	spelling, style	Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML, Re:VIEW)	JavaScript	MIT
RedPen	Yes (via Java)	spelling, style	Yes (Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, Textile, Re:VIEW, and LaTeX)	Java	Apache-2.0
write-good	Yes (via JavaScript)	style	No	JavaScript	MIT
proselint	No	style	No	Python	BSD 3-Clause
Joblint	No	style	No	JavaScript	MIT
alex	No	style	Yes (Markdown)	JavaScript	MIT

The exact definition of "Supports Markup" varies by tool but, in general, it means that the format is understood at a higher level than a regular plain-text file (for example, features like excluding code blocks from spell check).

Extensibility means that there's a built-in means of creating your own rules without modifying the original source code.

Benchmarks

This benchmark has all three tools configured to use their implementations of the write-good rule set and Unix-style output.	This benchmark runs Vale's implementation of proselint's rule set against the original. Both tools are configured to use JSON output.
This benchmark runs Vale's implementation of Joblint's rule set against the original. Both tools are configured to use JSON output.	This benchmark has all three tools configured to perform only English spell checking using their default output styles.

All benchmarking was performed using the open-source hyperfine tool on a MacBook Pro (2.9 GHz Intel Core i7):

hyperfine --warmup 3 '<command>'

The corpus IDs in the above plots—gitlab and ydkjs—correspond to the following files:

• A snapshot of GitLab's open-source documentation (1,500 Markdown files).

• A chapter from the open-source book You Don't Know JS.