4.6k stars · BSD-3-Clause · v0.16.0 (2025-11-14) · Track this in Scout
The classic prose linter — aggregated advice from well-known editors as a command-line tool.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
proselint applies a set of checks drawn from well-known style guides and editors, each one narrow and each one switchable. It reads a text, Markdown or plain file and prints the line, the column and what it objected to.
What it is good for. Anybody who writes documentation, release notes, landing pages or a newsletter without a colleague to read it first. It will not tell you whether an argument works. It will catch the sentence you have written a hundred times without noticing.
- BSD-3-Clause, which asks almost nothing of you.
- Every check can be turned off individually in a small configuration file, so the noisy ones stop being noisy after ten minutes of tuning.
- It runs entirely on your machine. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for anything unpublished.
- Development has moved to Codeberg. The GitHub repository now describes itself as "[Mirror] A linter for prose." and the project link in its sidebar is
codeberg.org/amperser/proselint. Issues and the newest work belong there; GitHub is a copy. - The newest release is v0.16.0, dated 14 November 2025, ten months ago, though code landed on 4 September 2026.
- English only, and the advice is culturally particular. Some rules argue with each other, and a few will be wrong for your voice.
vale-cli/vale6,144 stars, the actively developed alternative; it understands Markdown structure properly and lets you write your own house rules, which proselint does not.
Track this in Scout- retextjs/retext
2,435 stars, a JavaScript framework for the same class of checks; its last code landed on 4 February 2025, nineteen months ago.
Track this in Scout - btford/write-good
5,079 stars, a much smaller set of checks in JavaScript; its last code landed on 10 March 2025, eighteen months ago.
Track this in Scout
python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install proselint proselint README.md proselint --config .proselintrc.json article.md
