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Apply a house style to your dictation

If you write to a house style — "e-mail" not "email", US spelling, "cannot" not "can not" — the Style-Consistency Enforcer (styleguard) rewrites each dictation to match, so you don't have to remember the rule mid-sentence. A local Vale-lite pass, entirely offline. Off by default.

1. Enable the feature

yazses features enable styleguard

2. Write your style rules

Create style-rules.toml next to config.toml (~/.config/yazses/style-rules.toml). Each rule maps a preferred term to the variants it replaces:

# ~/.config/yazses/style-rules.toml
[[rule]]
preferred = "e-mail"
variants = ["email", "e mail"]

[[rule]]
preferred = "cannot"
variants = ["can not"]

[[rule]]
preferred = "U.S."
variants = ["US"]
ignore_case = false        # only the uppercase "US" is rewritten, not "us"
  • Matching is whole-word and case-insensitive by default (ignore_case = true); set ignore_case = false for terms where case carries meaning.

  • Set regex = true on a rule to read each entry in variants as a regular expression instead of a literal word — preferred is still the literal text that replaces it:

    [[rule]]
preferred = "<year>"
variants = ["[0-9]{4}"]     # matched as a pattern
regex = true

  • A rule is skipped, and the reason logged, if it is missing preferred, has an empty variants list, uses a non-string term, or sets regex = true with a pattern that does not compile. The rest of the file still applies — a mistyped rule costs you that rule, never the daemon and never the other rules.

3. Point the config at the file (optional) and restart

[styleguard] path defaults to style-rules.toml (relative to the config dir), so the file above is found automatically. To use a different location:

# config.toml
[styleguard]
enabled = true                  # written by `yazses features enable styleguard`
path = "style-rules.toml"       # relative to config dir, or an absolute path

yazses restart                  # apply

Say "send an email" and it lands as "send an e-mail".

See also