@getstation/electron-spellchecker

electron-spellchecker

⚠️ 3.x versions are only compatible with Electron >= 5

electron-spellchecker is a library to help you implement spellchecking in your Electron applications, as well as handle default right-click Context Menus (since spell checking shows up in them). This library intends to solve the problem of spellchecking in a production-ready, international-friendly way.

electron-spellchecker:

• Spell checks in all of the languages that Google Chrome supports by reusing its dictionaries.
• Automatically detects the language the user is typing in and silently switches on the fly.
• Handles locale correctly and automatically (i.e. users who are from Australia should not be corrected for 'colour', but US English speakers should)
• Automatically downloads and manages dictionaries in the background.
• Checks very quickly, doesn't introduce input lag which is extremely noticable
• Only loads one Dictionary at a time which saves a significant amount of memory

Quick Start

import {SpellCheckHandler, ContextMenuListener, ContextMenuBuilder} from 'electron-spellchecker';

window.spellCheckHandler = new SpellCheckHandler();
window.spellCheckHandler.attachToInput();

// Start off as US English, America #1 (lol)
window.spellCheckHandler.switchLanguage('en-US');

let contextMenuBuilder = new ContextMenuBuilder(window.spellCheckHandler);
let contextMenuListener = new ContextMenuListener((info) => {
  contextMenuBuilder.showPopupMenu(info);
});

Language Auto-Detection

The spell checker will attempt to automatically check the language that the user is typing in and switch on-the fly. However, giving it an explicit hint by calling switchLanguage, or providing it a block of sample text via provideHintText will result in much better results.

Sample text should be text that is reasonably likely to be in the same language as the user typing - for example, in an Email reply box, the original Email text would be a great sample, or in the case of Slack, the existing channel messages are used as the sample text.

About node-spellchecker

This module uses a fork of Atom's excellent node-spellchecker that takes a slightly different path on Windows by using Hunspell only. You can find the source here.

Learning more

• Run npm start to start the example application and play around.
• Read the class documentation to learn more.