📝 alex — Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing.

Whether your own or someone else’s writing, alex helps you find gender favouring, polarising, race related, religion inconsiderate, or other unequal phrasing.

For example, when We’ve confirmed his identity is given to alex, it will warn you and suggest using their instead of his.

Suggestions, feature requests, and issues are more than welcome!

Give alex a spin on the Online demo ».

Why

• To get better at considerate writing;
• Catches many possible offenses;
• Suggests helpful alternatives;
• Reads plain-text and markdown as input;
• Stylish.

Install

npm (with Node.js):

$ npm install alex --global

Table of Contents

• Command Line

• API

  • alex(value)
  • alex.markdown(value)
  • alex.text(value)

• Integrations

• Support

• File finding

• .alexignore

• Workflow

• FAQ

  • Why is this named alex?
  • Alex didn’t check ‘X’!

• Contributing

• License

Command Line

Let’s say example.md looks as follows:

The boogeyman wrote all changes to the **master server**. Thus, the slaves
were read-only copies of master. But not to worry, he was a cripple.

Then, run alex on example.md:

$ alex example.md

Yields:

example.md
   1:5-1:14  warning  `boogeyman` may be insensitive, use `boogey` instead
  1:42-1:48  warning  `master` / `slaves` may be insensitive, use `primary` / `replica` instead
  2:52-2:54  warning  `he` may be insensitive, use `they`, `it` instead
  2:59-2:66  warning  `cripple` may be insensitive, use `person with a limp` instead

See $ alex --help for more information.

When no input files are given to alex, it searches for markdown and text files in the current directory, doc, and docs.

API

npm:

$ npm install alex --save

alex is also available for bower and duo, and as an AMD, CommonJS, and globals module, uncompressed and compressed.

alex(value)

alex.markdown(value)

Example

alex('We’ve confirmed his identity.').messages;
/*
 * [ { [1:17-1:20: `his` may be insensitive, use `their`, `theirs` instead]
 *   name: '1:17-1:20',
 *   file: '',
 *   reason: '`his` may be insensitive, use `their`, `theirs` instead',
 *   line: 1,
 *   column: 17,
 *   fatal: false } ]
 */

Parameters

• value (VFile or string) — Markdown or plain-text.

Returns

VFile. You’ll probably be interested in its messages property, as demonstrated in the example above, as it holds the possible violations.

alex.text(value)

Works just like alex(), but does not parse as markdown (thus things like code are not ignored)

Example

alex('The `boogeyman`.').messages; // []

alex.text('The `boogeyman`.').messages;
/*
 * [ { [1:6-1:15: `boogeyman` may be insensitive, use `boogey` instead]
 *   name: '1:6-1:15',
 *   file: '',
 *   reason: '`boogeyman` may be insensitive, use `boogey` instead',
 *   line: 1,
 *   column: 6,
 *   fatal: false } ]
 */

Integrations

• Atom — wooorm/atom-linter-alex
• Sublime — sindresorhus/SublimeLinter-contrib-alex
• Visual Studio Code — shinnn/vscode-alex
• Gulp — dustinspecker/gulp-alex
• Slack — keoghpe/alex-slack

Support

alex checks for many patterns of English language, and warns for:

• Gendered work-titles, for example warning about garbageman and suggesting garbage collector instead;

• Gendered proverbs, such as warning about like a man and suggesting bravely instead, or ladylike and suggesting courteous;

• Blunt phrases, such as warning about cripple and suggesting person with a limp instead;

• Intolerant phrasing, such as warning about using master and slave together, and suggesting primary and replica instead.

alex ignores words meant literally, so “he”, He — ..., and the like are not warned about

File finding

alex CLI searches for files with a markdown or text extension when given directories (e.g., $ alex . will find readme.md and foo/bar/baz.txt). To prevent files from being found by alex, add an .alexignore file.

.alexignore

The alex CLI will sometimes search for files. To prevent files from being found, add a file named .alexignore in one of the directories above the current working directory. The format of these files is similar to .eslintignore (which is in turn similar to .gitignore files).

For example, when working in ~/alpha/bravo/charlie, the ignore file can be in charlie, but also in ~.

The ignore file for this project itself looks as follows:

# Both `node_modules` and `bower_components` are
# ignored by default:
# node_modules/
# bower_components/

components/
example.md

Workflow

The recommended workflow is to add alex locally and to run it with your tests.

A package.json file with npm scripts, and additionally using AVA for unit tests, could look as follows:

{
  "scripts": {
    "test-api": "ava",
    "test-doc": "alex",
    "test": "npm run test-api && npm run test-doc"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "alex": "^1.0.0",
    "ava": "^0.1.0"
  }
}

FAQ

Why is this named alex?

It’s a nice androgynous/unisex name, it was free on npm, I like it! 😄

Alex didn’t check ‘X’!

See CONTRIBUTING.md on how to get ‘X’ checked by alex.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT © Titus Wormer