tint

A text linter based on excellent projects like proselint, alex, and write- good. In fact, we have stolen from them liberally.

Warning

If you go looking at the source code, be warned that we check for lots of profane and insensitive words.

Inspiration

While I like prose linters, they often don't do what I want and are SLOW. This is a personal experiment in writing a fast text linter in Go.

Some Optimization Work

In order to keep tint as fast as possible, the regular expressions used are as simple as possible (but no simpler). Here are some optimizations used:

• We keep two copies of a linted file: the original text and a processed version. The processed version allows for must faster searching. Warning messages quote from the original text. In order to prevent the use of slow case insensitive regex's, we lowercase the entire file. We also use the opportunity to replace string that we won't check with spaces (currently only URL's).
• Instead of adding word boundary checking to every regexp that need to match entire words, we do post-find boundary checking. See existence_checks.go for an example.
• Passive voice detection could be accomplished with a single super-complicated regex, but instead we use many single word regex's. The match routine for passive voice then perform a quick "look behind" to check for the other word common in the construction.

Repo layout

Currently the project is small enough that the command line program and all code are right here in a single main package.

./scripts contains build/development scripts. make is used as the build tool. Running make install should be sufficient to test, build, and install. See ./Makefile for details.

./res contains resources used for testing.

./helper contains wrappers around tint that you might find interesting. make install will create a symbolic link to tintc in $GOPATH/bin. However, you'll need Python 3 and the Python library colorclass installed to use it. (you can install colorclass with pip: pip3 install --user colorclass).

Hacking

This project uses the new go dep for dependency management (though there are few deps). Use make update to update dependencies.

make test runs ./script/test which runs go test but also includes some manual tests for common errors that have cropped up in the code base.

Running make lint will run go fmt, go vet, golint, and goconst. make lint-install will install all the lint tools that you need.