COMPARISON.md: Please compare to typos, zspell, spellbook

[tv42]

It'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on these, and why I shouldn't prefer e.g. typos-lsp over harper.

https://github.com/crate-ci/typos

https://crates.io/crates/zspell

https://crates.io/crates/spellbook

https://github.com/drahnr/cargo-spellcheck

[tv42]

Especially the zspell/hunspell angle, and harper vs cargo-spellcheck.

[tvanderstad]

I did 30m of casual research while evaluating options for my app today. I haven't learned about rulesets or done any performance benchmarks yet, so I'll check back when I have more info, but here's what I can share so far:

Typos

Typos advertises a source code checker. In my case that doesn't work because my app needs to spell check markdown, which Harper does support.

Typos advertises spell checking entire monorepos, which would be really fast, but is also subject to any number of optimizations (like caching results per-file). I'll report back if I try it.

Like Harper, Typos runs locally and does not require an internet connection or send your data (or your user's data) to 3rd parties.

Typos does advertise a plugin for VSCode and a language server. They have a library. I've been using Zed, which they don't advertise a plugin for. I installed Harper's Zed plugin today and have been having a good experience. Surely you could get it working in Vim if that's your thing.

Hunspell

Hunspell is already in COMPARISON.md. It's written in C++ and used by Firefox and LibreOffice. It's advertised as a 'spell checker and morphological analyzer' and uses a comical amount of big linguistics-specific terms in its readme.

ZSpell

ZSpell 'maintains compatibility with the venerable Hunspell dictionary format' which sounds great for re-using existing dictionaries, including my users' system dictionaries. I do not assume it does the morphological analysis of Hunspell itself. Suggestions are currently unstable due to performance issues.

Like Harper and Typos, ZSpell runs locally. However, it doesn't have a language server or plugins. It's intended to be used as a Rust library with Python bindings (beta).

Spellbook

Spellbook is a Rust spellchecking library (no bindings, LSP, or plugins) that calls it's development phase 'alpha'. It also maintains compatibility with the Hunspell dictionary format. Suggestions are 'planned'.

Cargo Spellcheck

Cargo Spellcheck, like Typos, is a source code typo checker. cargo spellcheck fix works a lot like cargo fix and it's optimized for Rust development. It uses Hunspell or NLPRule for checks/suggestions.