====================
General Information:
====================

Author:  Anthony Panozzo
Contact:  panozzaj@gmail.com
Script URL:  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2429
License:  GPL


=====================
Detailed description:
=====================

Looking through the examples in Vim, there are examples of correcting typos and misspellings like:

iabbrev teh the
iabbrev het the
...

However, it is very time-consuming to create this list by hand.  You also have to enter the correct capitalization, which is a pain.  ('teh->the' is not equal to 'Teh->The')

It seems silly for everyone to create their own autocorrect file, so hopefully we can work together to make a sweet list.  I found a nice list from Wikipedia and cleaned it up a bit as a basis, and incorporated the typo fixes from Vim Cream.  I also added some words that I commonly misspelled or mistyped, and have taken additional contributions from users of the script.

I'm sure there are some mistakes, or common mistakes that aren't in here yet, so if you find any, please contact me and I will gladly change things.  There are some additional details or thoughts as well as a shortcut to a word-processing mode at http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2008/11/06/vim-word-processing.

I find this script invaluable when using Mozex to edit forms online (blog posts, web mail, etc.)

There is a GitHub repository that you can contribute to at http://github.com/panozzaj/vim-autocorrect/tree/master


================
Install details:
================

You can just type :source /path/to/the/autocorrect.vim to load up the corrections.

I recommend putting autocorrect.vim in your vimfiles directory somewhere and then sourcing it when you want autocorrect to be enabled.  The other two files included in the .tar file are just to generate the list.  I would not recommend adding directly to autocorrect.vim, as these changes will get wiped out whenever you regenerate.  Ruby is necessary to generate from the data file, but a generated file is included in the .tar, so you can start immediately!


=================
General thoughts:
=================

Currently Vim has no built-in way to correct multiple words, so doing something like 'a a->a' is not possible.  There is a file in the GitHub repository that contains some of these in case there ever comes an easy way to do this.

It might be nice to generate this list in a way similar to how Google generates spelling corrections (Bayesian approach.)  This would be require less labor on my part, because there are many ways you can screw something up while typing.  However, it's not clear how fast this would be, or how good of a job it would do of automatically correcting without having false positives.

My philosophy on contributions is to take only the ones that I could reasonably see a sober person making on a qwerty keyboard who is in a hurry.  So if there are random characters in there, it's not likely going to make it in.  That should capture 95% of errors, since most are due to spelling errors or transpositions.

If there is a questionable correction, I consult Google.  Slightly antiquated words will be left as-is.  If the left side is correct already, I won't add that correction.  If something is close to two words, I will take the more common one, or just leave out the correction.

I've thought about adding ones like (c)->©, but it's not clear to me how many people would benefit from this.  So I guess in general, my philosophy is to make the changes that will help most of the people most of the time.