Your style.
Our editor.

GitHub stars: 6.2K
downloads: 14.2M
teams listed: 90

Vale brings code-like linting to prose. Turn a team’s style guide, a house voice, or a journal’s author guidelines into checks that run in your editor and alongside your code.

Get started See how it works

macOS, Windows & Linux · Runs offline

01Your guideline

Writing guide · Terminology

The product is Vale CLI. Don’t write ~~Vale cli~~ or ~~vale-cli~~.

02A rule you own

styles/Docs/Terms.yml

extends: substitution
message: "Use '%s' instead of '%s'."
level: error
action:
  name: replace
swap:
  'Vale cli|vale-cli': Vale CLI
  'style ?guide': style guide
  'e-?mail': email

03Feedback where you write

docs/install.md

# Installation
Vale cli runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

error Use 'Vale CLI' instead of 'Vale cli'. Docs.Terms

Encode your guidelines in YAML, or start with a published style: Microsoft, Google, or Red Hat. Browse them all in the Explorer.

Setting up with an agent?Open in Claude ↗Open in ChatGPT ↗Agent skills →

Thanks to Claude for Open Source.

Supporting the project

Sponsor spotlights

These companies support Vale's future — and put it to work in their own products today.

Mintlify Sponsor Ships Vale as a built-in CI check. Read the story Promptless Sponsor Runs Vale on every doc its agents write. Read the story

See everyone who funds Vale

Used in production

Read their configs

Every team here publishes something you can open — the .vale.ini they run, or the page they wrote about running it.

Browse all 90

Why Vale

Most tools see text. Vale sees a document.

Check the writing in context. Target a heading, a comment, or a description, while leaving the code around it alone.

01Scopes

Your document has structure.
Your rules should too.

Apply different checks to headings, lists, and table cells. Vale parses the markup first, so code blocks and link URLs stay out of the way.

Explore markup and scopes

guide.mdWhat Vale sees

# Getting startedheading

Write with your team’s voice.paragraph

- Keep instructions clear.list

[Read the guide](https://example.com)URL skipped

```sh
vale docs/
```

code skipped

Check the prose. Preserve the code.

12 markup formats

Markdown
AsciiDoc
reStructuredText
MDX
MyST
Quarto
Typst
HTML
XML
DITA
Org
QDoc

02Code

The comments count, too.

Extract comments with tree-sitter grammars, then check the Markdown inside them. A comment marker inside a string stays code.

Markdown inside a doc comment

/// Creates a person with the given name. paragraph
/// 
/// # Examples heading
/// ``` code skipped
/// let person = Person::new("name"); 
/// ``` 
pub fn new(name: &str) -> Person { not a comment

19 languages

Go
Rust
Python
Ruby
C++
C
JavaScript
TypeScript
TSX
Java
Haskell
Julia
Lua
PHP
R
QML
Protobuf
YAML
CSS

Explore code comments

03Views

Find prose in unexpected places.

A View selects the writing inside structured files. Check an API description, a notebook cell, or a commit message with rules for that context.

Select the description

openapi: 3.1.0 
info: 
  title: Example API 
  version: 1.0.0 
  description: Manage your projects. description
paths: 
  /projects: {} 

Beyond documents

OpenAPI
Jupyter
Commit messages
Transcripts
Docstrings
JSON
YAML
TOML

Explore Views

04Speed

Built for the whole repository.

One Go binary. Parallel checks. No separate runtime.

See the benchmark

GitLab documentation · one run

Markdown pages: 2,827
Rules applied: 82
Start to finish: <20s

Distribution

Where Vale is downloaded

Seven registries publish a download count, and each counts a different window, so they sit side by side here rather than in one total.

14.2M
downloads to date: GitHub Releases, Docker Hub, conda-forge, Chocolatey · the channels reporting a lifetime total; 6.2K
stars on GitHub: vale-cli/vale; 65
contributors: across the main repository

Sources: GitHub, Docker Hub, PyPI, npm, conda-forge, Homebrew, Chocolatey, WinGet, Snapcraft, and Repology · updated 2026-08-28

One tool, every app

More than just a command-line interface.

Vale runs where you already write—in your editor, in your notes app, and in CI before anything merges.

Apps

Wherever the prose gets written, with diagnostics as you type.

Automation

The same run, before anything merges.

Documentation platforms

Hosted docs that run Vale for you.

Learn more about our integrations

From the blog

Notes from building Vale.

Releases, the standard library, and prose linting in the age of agents. Every post ships with Vale's own report on it.

Sep 24, 2026

Which kind of page is this?

Diataxis is a Vale package for the four kinds of documentation in Diátaxis: tutorials, how-to guides, reference, and explanation, each checked against the job it claims to do.

0 alerts 6 min
Sep 17, 2026

Linting a manuscript

Journals is a Vale package for scientific papers: the conventions every journal shares, the Nature and PLOS ONE author guidelines, and the CONSORT, STROBE, and PRISMA checklists, read section by section.

0 alerts 7 min
Sep 10, 2026

Linting commit messages

Commits is a Vale package for the log: nine conventions, the rule sets of commitlint, gitlint, committed, conform, and commitizen, spelling on the body, and a hook that runs in 12 ms.

0 alerts 6 min

Read all 6 posts RSS

A few lines of config.
A consistent first draft.

Start with an existing style guide. Keep the configuration in your project so everyone runs the same checks.

Install Vale.Choose a package for your operating system.
Pick your styles.Save this as .vale.ini in your project.
Sync, then lint.Download the styles and check your docs.

Get started Check out the source code

.vale.iniConfig reference ↗

StylesPath = styles
MinAlertLevel = suggestion
Packages = Microsoft

[*.md]
BasedOnStyles = Vale, Microsoft

$ vale sync
$ vale docs/

Make it your own with a YAML rule

extends: substitution
message: "Use '%s' instead of '%s'."
level: warning
swap:
  utilize: use

Learn to write rules →

Your style.Our editor.

Your document has structure.Your rules should too.