vscode-spellright

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I needed to do this again and it was not as easy as I hoped so I'd like to post this step by step guide. Anyone, feel free to post your notes. Based on https://github.com/bartosz-antosik/vscode-spellright/issues/502#issuecomment-1105281180 / PR #503.

When you need this

Spell Right sometimes stops working in VSCode, showing the "Activating extension ban.spellright failed" error in the console as reported in #502, #500 or #513.

The reason is that Spell Right binaries are built against specific Electron versions and if VSCode updates this, binaries have to be recompiled.

How to do it

1: Checkout this repo

2: cd lib/bin/node-spellchecker

3: Run npm i

4: Try to run ./build-macos-apple.sh. If it fails on node-gyp like this:

$ ./build-macos-apple.sh
./build-macos-apple.sh: line 5: node-gyp: command not found
cp: build/Release/spellchecker.node: No such file or directory
./build-macos-apple.sh: line 8: node-gyp: command not found
cp: build/Release/spellchecker.node: No such file or directory

then install node-gyp:

npm install -g node-gyp

5: Update the Electron version in a build script: find out the current version by invoking the Help: About command, you should see something like this:

Here, the new Electron version is 18.3.5.

6: Update the build-macos-apple.sh script: keep one older version and create a new one as recommended by @bartosz-antosik here. For example, this might be the diff:

#!/bin/bash

# requires node-gyp (npm install -g node-gyp) plus CLI developer tools

-node-gyp rebuild --target=13.1.7 --arch=arm64 --dist-url=https://electronjs.org/headers
-cp build/Release/spellchecker.node ../spellchecker-darwin-13.1.7-arm64.node

node-gyp rebuild --target=17.2.0 --arch=arm64 --dist-url=https://electronjs.org/headers
cp build/Release/spellchecker.node ../spellchecker-darwin-17.2.0-arm64.node

+node-gyp rebuild --target=18.3.5 --arch=arm64 --dist-url=https://electronjs.org/headers
+cp build/Release/spellchecker.node ../spellchecker-darwin-18.3.5-arm64.node

5: Run ./build-macos-apple.sh again. This time it should succeed.

Note: I think I was fighting with Python 2 vs. 3 when I last did this 3 months ago, see e.g. https://github.com/bartosz-antosik/vscode-spellright/pull/503#issuecomment-1105640961 or https://github.com/bartosz-antosik/vscode-spellright/issues/502#issuecomment-1105351546, but the current node-gyp (version 0.10.0) doesn't work with Python 2 and will use the Python 3 just fine.

6: Delete the old binary – in the example above, you'd remove the file for 13.1.7.

7: Test the new version locally, for example, to test the new 18.3.5 build with the 3.0.64 version of ban.spellright extension, do this:

cp ../spellchecker-darwin-18.3.5-arm64.node ~/.vscode/extensions/ban.spellright-3.0.64/lib/bin

The reload VSCode and spelling should work 🎉.

8: Commit the changes to ./build-macos-apple.sh and the new binaries, open a pull request.

@bartosz-antosik possibly pin this issue?

Hi @borekb! I have noticed that a new version of Electron appeared in Insiders version. If you could maybe rebuild Mac binaries would be great!

@bartosz-antosik hi, I'll be happy to do this if I find a little bit of time 😄. BTW this is interesting: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-08-09-github-actions-self-hosted-runners-now-support-apple-m1-hardware/

UPDATE: done in #520.

@borekb @bartosz-antosik Do this method still work? I followed the instructions and successfully compiled the Windows binary, but the extension still doesn't work with Electron 19.0.17 on VSCode 1.73.1 .

@fabiorzfreitas I thing generally the extension at the moment works with 19.0.17 (insiders build here):

Also seems to be working fine with Electron 19.1.3 (also insiders build):

Generally, the method outlined above should be still ok.

@bartosz-antosik That's interesting. I'll be opening a new issue (or rather I'll first check if it wouldn't be a duplicate), but it seems that the error that happen when trying to spell check large files is the same "spellright.command not found" error that happens in the issues mentioned here.