Spellchecking POD with TextMate

Trelane was asking on irc today about how to get TextMate to spell check POD. It doesn’t by default, which is annoying as it’s clever enough to check the spelling of strings.

The answer is fairly simple. Go into the Bundle Editor (^⌥⌘B) and open up the Perl category. Near the bottom you’ll see a “Comments” preferences item. Click on the plus box at the bottom of the screen and add another preferences item. Name it “Pod” and stick this in it:

    {    spellChecking = 1; }

In the “Scope Selector” field, type in comment.documentation.perl.

At this point, you have to restart TextMate. I’m not sure why, but you do. But afterwards, you should get lots of dotted red lines inside your pod.

Sadly, the Perl language definition inside TextMate doesn’t distinguish bits of pod much, so you’ll have to add words like “head1” to your dictionary (or fix the language definition).