My first job out of college had nothing to do with programming.
I worked at my alma mater in the public relations department as a writer and proofreader. The irony here is that, prior to college, I hated writing–and I was a terrible speller.
What could go wrong?
The PR department frequently sent out mass mailings to college alumni. No matter how hard we tried, a few typos would occasionally slip by. Usually no one noticed.
But …
They definitely noticed the one time, when we misspelled my boss’s title.
Bad enough.
But it got worse.
His title: “Director of Public Relations.”
We left out the L. Yup, that one.
He took it well.
“When you make a mistake in this business,” my boss used to say, “you can take comfort in the fact that you’ve printed and mailed thousands of copies.”
Spell checking can’t save you from every mistake like this, but it’ll catch a lot of them.
Sublime has a basic spell checker built right into it, but it’s turned off by default. (It doesn’t make sense to see red squiggly lines all over your code, but it can be very helpful when you’re writing a blog post.)
You can quickly toggle spell checking in a particular file by pressing F6. It’ll stay enabled on that file until you close it.
If you want even more robust spell checking, you can install the Google Spell Check plugin from Package Control.
Google Spell Check will look up a selected word on Google and automatically replace it with Goole’s recommended spelling. This is especially useful for words that aren’t in standard dictionaries, like company names.
You can also check entire phrases, like, say, a job title, and Google will identify and fix misspellings based on the context.
Would have saved us a lot of embarrassment back in the day.
For more ways to save yourself from yourself, join the Sublime Text Tips newsletter. I can’t guarantee it’ll be free of spelling errors, but there’s still lots of useful info: