Referencing key matches in values for swaps about vale

[jdkato]

As you suspected, there's currently no way to do this without writing a more generic message (e.g., something like Prefer '<keyword>-block' over 'if block', where "if block" is the match).

And while I think it would be a nice addition, the issue is that the individual swap rules are currently converted into a single pattern (for performance reasons) under the hood. This makes it more difficult to keep track of what capture group \1 actually refers to.

That said, message customization is definitely something that I'd like to improve—it's just a matter of finding a balance between usability and performance (especially since rule evaluation is very much a "hot path" task).

[abingham]

OK, I figured there were good reasons for the current state. What I've done is to write a Python script that generates the rules, and this seems to work well.

Though on that note: what about letting users express rules in Python (or ruby or whatever...any proper programming language)? These scripts could sit right next to the existing yaml files, and Vale could run those to compile the yaml rules. I'm not necessarily recommending this, esp. as I think my use-case is pretty rare, but it might be a useful "power tool" for some users.

I'll go ahead and close this. Thanks for the quick response!

[jdkato]

Supporting external scripts has actually been a goal of mine since the start. In fact, there was unofficial support for this until v0.5.0 using the following extension style:

extends: script		
scope: text		
runtime: node		
exe: check_spelling.js 

where check_spelling.js was, for example, a Node.js script that called Atom's SpellChecker module. There are a number of details that I need to iron out, but it's definitely in the works.