vim cannot find word list

After installing spf13 vim every time I would open a file I had trouble with two things on my mac:

• File opening would halt in the middle with the following error : Cannot find word list “en.utf-8.spl” or “en.ascii.spl”
• Syntax highlighting also failed thereafter

Here’s what I would see:

$ vim release.sh 
Warning: Cannot find word list "en.utf-8.spl" or "en.ascii.spl"
Press ENTER or type command to continue

I googled a lot regarding this but didn’t find anything straight forward. When all options failed I recalled that it is looking for the spell files in a specific folder. Hence I decided to do a lookup for them:

locate en.utf-8

I got a lot of options:

$ locate en.utf-8

/usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.4-73/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime/spell/en.utf-8.spl
/usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.4-73/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime/spell/en.utf-8.sug
/usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.712/share/vim/vim74/spell/en.utf-8.spl
/usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.712/share/vim/vim74/spell/en.utf-8.sug
/usr/share/vim/vim73/spell/en.utf-8.spl
/usr/share/vim/vim73/spell/en.utf-8.sug

One of the options was to change the runtimepath to let it know about the spell folders.

let &runtimepath=("~/.vim/,/usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.712/share/vim/vim74/spell/," . &runtimepath)

When that failed too and nothing else worked, I decided to copy out the file and give it a try:

cp /usr/local/Cellar/vim/7.4.712/share/vim/vim74/spell/en.utf-8.spl ~/.vim/spell

To my surprise, that worked!