// the find
torvalds/HunspellColorize
Wrapper around 'less' to colorize spelling mistakes using Hunspell
A minimal C program by Linus Torvalds that pipes text through Hunspell and wraps `less` to highlight spelling mistakes in the terminal. Useful as a Git pager to catch typos in commit messages and diffs. The author explicitly calls it a stop-gap.
Single-file C implementation means there's nothing to figure out about project structure. Drops in cleanly as a GIT_PAGER with two env var exports. Using Hunspell as the backend means you get a real dictionary, not a toy word list. Linus's own README is refreshingly honest about what it doesn't do.
US ASCII only — any non-English project or file with accented characters will produce noise. No context awareness at all: URLs, file paths, variable names, and hex strings all get flagged. The author says the real fix is in uemacs and this exists only until that happens, so expect zero maintenance. 348 stars suggests people find it useful, but 15 forks in years means nobody is improving it.