How To: Enable Spell Check System Wide?

Greetings lovely community,

Currently on EndeavourOS Gnome 40 DE, and I recently noticed that EndeavourOS doesn’t seem to support out of the box or have enabled by default an active spell checker, unless I missed something? I’m on an English system btw, but for example whenever I misspell a word in Vivaldi, I get a red colored squiggly line under it indicating that I have misspelled the word. I believe this is something that Vivaldi incorporates naively, but I’ve used Gnome for years and I’ve always had the red squiggly line system wide in other applications too, but in my quick testing it doesn’t show up in Gedit or LibreOffice (fresh) or Hexchat, to name a few. And I’ve always found this feature very invaluable, so if it’s possible I would love to have it working. I’ll post some quick screenshots of what I mean and the last screenshot is how I’d like it to work. I hope there is something simple I can do to fix this issue because my fingers type horribly so it definitely helps to know when I misspelled a word lol!

Screenshot from 2021-07-29 11-56-15
Screenshot from 2021-07-29 11-56-54
Screenshot from 2021-07-29 11-58-12
Screenshot from 2021-07-29 12-04-11

Do you have this :arrow_down: enabled in Gedit’s Settings >> Tools

gedit-spellcheck

Also you might need to install some spellchecker and dictionaries:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Language_checking#Spell_checkers

For Libreoffice, please refer to:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LibreOffice#Spell_checking

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Yup, I had that selected, I also showed that in the second screenshot in case I thought myself going crazy by making sure I had the right settings enabled :wink:

I did some quick searching around, and it looks like some Linux systems use either aspell, gtkspell, enchant, gspell, or hunspell. Not something I was currently familiar with, but when I checked which EndeavourOS had installed by default (I just searched pamac for each to see if any of them was already installed), and it was the hunspell package. Now I assume it was by choice not to install a certain language package by default since users all over the world use EndeavourOS, but the package hunspell-en_us is in the Extra repos, so once I installed that and restarted the applications it worked as intended! I wonder if the developers would consider installing the hunspell-en_us package by default perhaps, but I understand if they’d choose rather not to do that, but leave it up to the user. It just wasn’t clear from the beginning I had to do that, but luckily it was a super easy solution! @pebcak Thanks mate for your help and the links!

Install the hunspell-en_us package for English spell checking:

sudo pacman -S hunspell-en_us

Here’s a few updated screenshots to show all is well now! Couldn’t be happier again :slight_smile:


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If I remember correctly, there is a way to make a list of additional packages to be installed by Calamares. Once you have this list stored on a USB thumb drive, there is the possibility that you can set up Calamares to install your personal list of additional packages at installation.

I have never used it, so I don’t know how to set it up. Perhaps someone around here knows how to do this?

Pudge

EDIT:
It might be easier to make a list of what additional packages you want installed and put that in a simple script to be run immediately after the first boot up of your new system.

create a file: MyPackages.sh

#!/bin/bash
sudo pacman -S package1 package2 package3 etc

Make the file executable and store on a Thumb drive,

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Sure :upside_down_face:

https://discovery.endeavouros.com/installation/add-packages-to-be-installed-in-addition-to-desktop-chosen/2021/04/

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Thanks for having my back!

Pudge

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Not exactly a bash script, but I’ve always done like a check list of things to do after a fresh install of a distro, in case anything happens and I need a fresh install, I’ve already written down any of the troubleshooting stuff I need to do again instead of hunting it all down all over the internet.

Screenshot from 2021-07-29 14-12-56

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