Vale: Separate Personal And Third-Party Style Paths

Have you ever felt like your writing tools could use a little more organization? If you're a user of Vale, a powerful linter for prose, you might have encountered a situation where managing your styles feels a bit… cluttered. We're talking about the way Vale handles both your custom, personal styles and the styles provided by third-party packages. A recent feature request suggests a way to make this experience even better: allowing users to specify different directory paths for personal and third-party styles. This seemingly small tweak could lead to a more streamlined and intuitive workflow for many.

The Current Vale Style Management Landscape

Currently, Vale's StylesPath is a versatile directive that allows you to point to a directory where your styles are located. This includes both the styles you've created or customized yourself and the styles you've installed from various third-party packages. While this approach offers flexibility, it can also lead to some organizational challenges, especially as your project's style guide grows.

Imagine a scenario where you're meticulously crafting your project's style guide, adding custom rules, and fine-tuning existing ones. At the same time, you're relying on popular Vale packages like write-good or proselint for broader style coverage. Right now, both your personal tweaks and these external styles often reside within the same StylesPath. This can make it a bit tricky to differentiate between what's yours and what's from an external source, and it can also complicate how you manage your project's overall configuration, particularly when it comes to version control and ignoring files.

The Vision: A More Organized Approach

The core idea behind this feature request is to provide users with a more explicit and organized way to manage their Vale styles. The proposal is simple yet impactful: introduce separate configurations for personal styles and third-party styles. This would allow users to designate one directory for their own custom rules and another for the styles downloaded from external packages.

How it Could Work: A Practical Example

Let's paint a picture of how this could benefit your workflow. Consider the following:

1. Custom Vocabularies: Imagine you have a custom vocabulary file, say accept.txt for your company's specific jargon. With this new feature, you could easily place this file within a dedicated personal styles directory, perhaps something like dictionaries/vale/MyVocabulary/accept.txt. Vale would then be able to recognize and utilize this custom vocabulary without it being mixed in with generic or third-party dictionaries.
2. Third-Party Style Installation: When you run a command like vale sync to update your installed styles, Vale could intelligently place these third-party packages into a designated folder, for example, vale/third-party. This keeps all the externally sourced styles neatly separated from your own.

This separation aligns with common practices in software development where external dependencies are managed in distinct locations from project-specific code or configurations. Think of node_modules in Node.js or .venv in Python – these directories house third-party packages and are typically excluded from your main project files.

Why This Feature Matters: Addressing Key Pain Points

The request to separate personal and third-party styles isn't just about tidiness; it addresses some significant pain points for Vale users, particularly concerning ignoring files and maintaining clean project structures.

The Challenge of Mixed Content

As the feature request highlights, mixing personal and third-party content in the same folder isn’t the best practice for many developers. When your custom rules and downloaded styles are commingled, it can create an organizational headache. It becomes harder to identify which files you've modified and which are standard installations. This blurs the lines between your project's unique style guide and the general-purpose rules provided by others.

This lack of separation can also complicate how you instruct other tools to interact with your project. For instance, if your StylesPath contains both your personal configurations and third-party packages, you might need to create complex exclusion rules for your Version Control System (VCS) ignore files. You'd want to ensure that your personal configurations aren't accidentally committed if they contain sensitive information, or perhaps you want to track your custom styles but not the entire content of third-party packages.

The Burden of Exclusion Patterns

One of the most compelling reasons for this feature is the simplification of file ignoring. Currently, if you have third-party styles mixed with your personal ones, you often need to create extra ignore patterns to prevent certain files or directories from being processed by other tools. For example, you might need to tell your code editor's formatting checkers, spellcheckers, or YAML linters to exclude the directory where Vale stores its styles, or a specific subdirectory within it that contains configurations you don't want them to touch. This means remembering to add exceptions not only to your .gitignore but also to configurations for tools like EditorConfig, CSpell, and ESLint plugins.

This adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. Users have to actively manage these exceptions across multiple tools, increasing the cognitive load and the potential for errors. A simpler, more defined structure would eliminate the need for these intricate ignore patterns, making the overall project setup much cleaner and less prone to misconfiguration.

Seeking Solutions and the Current Landscape

While the desire for this feature is clear, users have explored existing documentation and resources to see if this behavior is already achievable or if there are workarounds. The search has revealed that, as of now, achieving this strict separation directly within Vale's configuration might not be straightforward.

Documentation Exploration

Discussions often start with reviewing the official Vale documentation. Pages like Packages, StylesPath, and Vocabularies are crucial. These resources explain how StylesPath works and mention that it contains both styles and a special config directory. However, they don't explicitly detail how to set up separate paths for personal versus third-party content. The documentation notes that the config directory is relative to the StylesPath, reinforcing the idea of a single primary location for styles.

Community and Code Investigations

Beyond the docs, users often dive into Vale's issue tracker and discussions. Related issues, such as #688 and #737, touch upon aspects of style management and configuration. However, these discussions haven't yet provided a clear path to implementing distinct directories for personal and third-party styles. Even digging into the source code, specifically sections like internal/core/config.go, shows how the StylesPath is processed, but doesn't offer an immediate solution for splitting the paths.

An attempt to use the Vale AI assistant also yielded an error (status 405), indicating that perhaps the AI itself wasn't equipped to answer this specific query at the time, further underscoring the need for a clearer, built-in solution.

The Path Forward: Enhancing Vale's Usability

This feature request is a valuable contribution to the Vale community. By enabling users to designate separate directories for personal and third-party styles, Vale can:

• Improve Organization: Offer a cleaner, more structured way to manage style assets.
• Simplify Configuration: Reduce the complexity of ignore patterns across various tools.
• Align with Best Practices: Mirror common development workflows that segregate third-party dependencies.

This enhancement would undoubtedly make Vale an even more powerful and user-friendly tool for writers and developers alike, ensuring that managing your prose linting is as smooth as the writing itself.

For more insights into linting and prose analysis tools, you might find the Write-good documentation and the Vale official documentation to be incredibly useful resources.