Zarf Updates: Neutering spellcheck on MacOS

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2024-06-10 20:30:04

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I know many people love it and many people rely on it. It's become a software standard, and for good reason. But I, personally, find it distracting and unhelpful. I spell pretty gud! So I always turn the feature off.

You can turn it off on a per-app basis. It's usually a menu item called "Check Spelling While Typing". (Under "Edit / Spelling and Grammar". Sometimes you have to right-click in the text window to get that menu.) Many apps, like Slack, have a custom preference that does the same thing. So I turn it off for every app, and...

For many apps it works great. Pages? Safari? Slack? BBEdit, where I'm typing this? No problem! Turn the preference off once, it stays off forever. (Or at least until I buy a new Mac, but that's once every several years.)

But for many apps, it just doesn't stick. I am very happy with Mona, the Mastodon client; but the "Check Spelling" preference resets on every single message you type. In the Zoom desktop client, it resets on every new call's chat pane. Even TextEdit, Apple's native text editor, loses track of the preference when I reopen a document. And then the red squiggles reappear.