How in the Tech

Tweaking Firefox’s spell-check notification

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 8, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Technology has allowed for us all to become quite lazy with our spelling. Spell-check is common place and unfortunately, more and more people are relying on the software to compose properly spelled and grammatically correct sentences. Clearly there is a lot of good and an equal amount of a bad with this trend. Nothing is more frustrating than composing a well thought out email response to your boss, clicking send, and then in a glance notice an embarrassing spelling error.

While many applications contain at least some form of spell-check capability, not all of them are in your face about the errors they detect. For some, the spell-check must be user initiated rather than checking words as they are typed. While this method is dwindling, it still exists. Firefox, however, is not such an application. Rather, misspelled words are identified by a red squiggly line underneath.

One of the problems I have with Firefox’s approach is the identification marker in a large wall of text is easy to ignore, for me at least. Interestingly, Firefox provides a few visual options to attract your attention – but not through it’s preferences interface. Instead, you are forced to dig deeper.

From the Firefox address bar access about:config and accept any warning messages.

In the Filter box search for ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. A default Firefox install likely will not have this key – your search will return nothing.

If that proves the case, it’s simple enough to create it. Right-click in the blank area and select New->Integer.

Give the key the name ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle as above. For the integer value you have a few options – this is what controls the visual cue for when a misspelling occurs.

• 0 is for no highlighting
• 1 is for a dotted line
• 2 is for a long dotted line
• 3 is for a single straight line
• 4 is for a double straight line, as shown below.
• 5 is for a squiggly line, the default when no key is present.

I choose option 4 as it really draw’s my attention to a problem, making sloppy typos or misspellings extremely tough to ignore. See for yourself!