memelint

memelint lints the memes of a project: the words that spread through comments, docstrings, and documentation. It tells you which words and sentences do not follow Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100), with an allowlist for the words of your project.

Each finding gives the file, the position, the severity, the message and the rule:

$ memelint check
foo.py:2:29: error: 'ensure' is not approved; use 'make sure' [STE 1.1]
foo.py:3:7: error: 'don't' is a contraction; write the words in full [STE 4.2]
foo.py:3:13: error: 'delve' is not in the STE dictionary; if it is a technical name, add it to memelint.toml [STE 1.6]
foo.py:4:7: error: sentence has 28 words; the STE limit for descriptive text is 25 [STE 6.3]
foo.py:4:7: error: 'closing' is the -ing form of 'close'; STE allows only the infinitive, imperative, past tense and past participle [STE 3.5]

The exit code is 1 when there is an error.

Installing

ASD-STE100 is copyrighted, thus the binary does not contain its dictionary. The first run downloads the PDF from ASD and makes the vocabulary in ~/.cache/memelint/. The Nix package makes it when it builds.

On your machine

Use the install script, or use Nix.

The install script

The release binaries are for Linux and macOS, on x86_64 and aarch64:

curl -fsSL https://memelint.sh | sh
memelint check

Nix

With Nix, there is no installation. This builds the checker with the vocabulary and with each tree-sitter grammar that nixpkgs has, and runs it:

$(nix-build --no-out-link \
  https://github.com/antimemes/memelint/archive/main.tar.gz)\
/bin/memelint check

With flakes:

nix run github:antimemes/memelint -- check

In GitHub Actions

Put this in .github/workflows/memelint.yml. The findings become annotations on the pull request:

name: memelint

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:

jobs:
  check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: antimemes/memelint@latest