Vale brings code-like linting to prose. Turn your team’s writing guidelines into checks that run in your editor and alongside your code.
Your rules. Your workflow. Entirely offline.
Writing guide · Terminology
The product is Vale CLI. Don’t write Vale cli or vale-cli.
styles/Docs/Terms.yml
extends: substitution message: "Use '%s' instead of '%s'." level: error swap: Vale cli: Vale CLI
docs/install.md
Thanks to Claude for Open Source.
Supporting the project
These companies support Vale's future — and put it to work in their own products today.
Used in production
Every team here publishes something you can open — the .vale.ini they run,
or the page they wrote about running it.
The EKS User Guide walks contributors through installing Vale for live style feedback.
Writeup · Cloud & infrastructureRuns a packaged PowerShell-Docs style in their Documentarian toolkit.
Repository · github.comVale's built-in rules across the public API documentation.
Public config · discord/discord-api-docsA required check in GitLab's documentation testing pipeline.
Writeup · Developer toolsPowers the prose linting rules in the Grafana Writers' Toolkit.
Writeup · Data & observabilityAll NeMo Agent Toolkit documentation is checked with Vale before it merges.
Writeup · Developer toolsEnforces style standards across the Docker product docs.
Public config · docker/docsMaintains "Vale at Red Hat", a public style package and onboarding guide.
Writeup · Open sourcePublishes datadog-vale and shifted docs quality left with it.
Writeup · Data & observabilityWhy Vale
A heading, a code block, a comment, and a link URL are not the same thing—and a rule that can't tell them apart is a rule you end up switching off.
Twelve formats, each through a real parser rather than a pattern. Rules can target headings, lists, or table cells—and code spans, URLs, and fenced blocks are skipped before a rule ever runs.
Vale lifts comments out of nineteen languages with tree-sitter grammars, so it knows where a comment ends and a marker inside a string literal stays code. The Markdown inside a doc comment is linted as though it were its own file.
An OpenAPI description, a notebook cell, the body of a commit, a docstring: a View says where the prose is in a file that isn’t a document, so Vale lints that and passes over the rest. A rule can target any one part by name.
Written in Go, with no runtime and files linted in parallel. GitLab runs 82 rules across all 2,827 pages of its documentation in under twenty seconds.
Distribution
Seven registries publish a download count, and each counts a different window, so they sit side by side here rather than in one total.
Sources: GitHub, Docker Hub, PyPI, npm, conda-forge, Homebrew, Chocolatey, WinGet, Snapcraft, and Repology · updated 2026-08-28
One tool, every app
Vale runs where you already write—in your editor, in your notes app, and in CI before anything merges.
Wherever the prose gets written, with diagnostics as you type.
The same run, before anything merges.
Hosted docs that run Vale for you.
Start with an existing style guide. Keep the configuration in your project so everyone runs the same checks.
.vale.ini in your project.StylesPath = styles
MinAlertLevel = suggestion
Packages = Microsoft
[*.md]
BasedOnStyles = Vale, Microsoft$ vale sync
$ vale docs/
extends: substitution
message: "Use '%s' instead of '%s'."
level: warning
swap:
utilize: use