Vale, code-like linting for prose

Vale introduces code-like linting for prose, enabling teams to enforce their style guides, house voice, or author guidelines as checks within their editors and alongside their code. Companies supporting Vale's future utilize it in their own products. Every team at Vale publishes their .vale.ini configuration and the pages they write about running it.

The tool checks writing in context, targeting headings, comments, or descriptions without altering the surrounding code. Different checks can be applied to headings, lists, and table cells. Vale parses markup first, ensuring code blocks and link URLs remain unaffected. It extracts comments using tree-sitter grammars, then checks the Markdown within them.

A comment marker inside a string remains code. A View focuses on the writing inside structured files, allowing checks for API descriptions, notebook cells, or commit messages with context-specific rules. One Go binary handles parallel checks without a separate runtime. Seven registries publish download counts for each source, displayed side by side rather than combined into a single total.