Where do I fix partial words incorrectly identified as errors with spell?

Question

I upgraded MacVim to 8.1.2168 (159) tonight and now the vimwiki files in Markdown format do not highlight correctly when I enable spell check.

I run set spell spelllang=en_ca as I have before. It looks almost like the spell check is finding all of the first word except the first character in some (but not all!) of the sentences, and reporting those fractions of words as misspellings.

I believe this is some sort of new conflict between the vimwiki files in Markdown format and the new upgraded version of vim and spellcapcheck

Abridged output from set:

 syntax=vimwiki      
 filetype=vimwiki    
 spell  
 spellcapcheck=[.?!]_[])'
 spellfile=~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add
 suffixesadd=.markd

I can see that the default string for spellcapcheck is default "[.?!]\_[\])'"' \t]\+" while mine is [.?!]_[])'. Yet I run

set spc="[.?!]\_[\])'"' \t]\+"

and the highlighting does not change.

When I run set list I can see that there is an eol at the end of each line. This is as I expect.

It is not lost on me that the first word of each sentence is not highlighted if the remaining characters after the first character form a valid word:

• David does not appear as a highlighted spelling error because avid is a valid word.
• Daphne appears as a highlighted spelling error because aphne is a typo.

Where do I look next to fix this?

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Answer 1

This is a known bug, introduced by patch v8.1.2153 that has since been fixed with patch v8.1.2172, so you'd need to update your MacVim to a new Version.

Answer 2

I am having the same issue. Just upgraded to 8.1.2168 a couple days ago. A couple things I noticed:

• My default spellcapcheck was set to [.?!]\_[\])'"^I ]\+, changing it to yours ([.?!]_[])') or [.?!]\_[\])'"' \t]\+ had no effect.
• Perhaps more interestingly, it doesn't appear that these are actually recognized as typos: when I use ]s and [s to move to misspelled words, vim skips over the words at the start of lines (unless they are explicitly misspelled).

In other words, looks like gvim doesn't actually think these are misspelled words, but erroneously highlights them anyways.

I tested this by opening up an empty file (vim -u NONE), running set spell, typing some words (some purposefully misspelled), observing what was highlighted, and using ]s & [s to see what was actually flagged as misspelled.