TIL - VIM spelling and plugin interaction

After months of writing, I realized that I was using spell checking all wrong, which led to quite a few typos making their way online.

The reason for that was that I had added a few plugins (like vimwiki) that overrode formatting and highlighting settings, so a lot of my typos were actually there and flagged by the spell checker, just not visibly highlighted.

So I went and moved my Markdown and spell checking settings after all the other plugins and color settings were loaded, and they now look like this:

"--- Writing ---
Plug 'tpope/vim-markdown'
" enable fenced code highlighting
let g:markdown_fenced_languages = ['html', 'python', 'bash=sh', 'javascript']
set spell spelllang=en_us
hi SpellBad term=standout cterm=standout,underline gui=underline

The last line is the critical thing, but I would rather manage settings as a block for each use case, and I’m somewhat annoyed that this has been going on for so long.