Spell-checking dbatools with Visual Studio Code

Andy Levy
dbatools, powershell, vscode

Earlier this week I was working on adding a new feature to Update-DbaTools and while looking at another cmdlet to check syntax/conventions, I noticed an ugly typo in some of the help for it. 100% perfect prose isn’t necessary in the comment-based help for PowerShell cmdlets, but seeing misspellings and such kind of bugs me. Fortunately this is something I can help fix since the module is on Github.

First I needed to find a spell-checker that works with Visual Studio Code to help me spot misspellings. This was slightly trickier than expected, as I use macOS at home and at least one of the first plugins I found was Windows-only. I finally settled on Code Spellchecker.

But as you can see from the marketplace page there, by default this plugin doesn’t know PowerShell. In my user settings file settings.json, I added PowerShell to the cSpell.enabledLanguageIds section so it’s always recognized:

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"cSpell.enabledLanguageIds": [
  "c", "cpp", "csharp", "go", "javascript", "javascriptreact", "json", "latex", "markdown", "php", "plaintext", "powershell", "python", "text", "typescript", "typescriptreact", "yml", "powershell"
  ],

And with that, VSCode was giving me green squiggles under lots of words - both misspelled and not. Code Spellchecker doesn’t understand PowerShell in its default setup, it doesn’t have a dictionary for it. Just to get things started, I added a cSpell.userWords section to my settings.json and the squiggles started disappearing. The list I’m working with so far is posted as a gist on Github:

I’ll keep this updated as I encounter more strings that need to be recognized, whether they’re PowerShell tokens or specific to the dbatools project. In addition to actual PowerShell syntax in there, I’m dropping in strings that are commonly found throughout the module. Eventually I suppose I should get a proper dictionary file or two together, but this works well for a quick & dirty way to get going with a spellcheck & language cleanup for the module.