Spelling Suggestions In OS X

May 3rd, 2009

suggestionsOne of the lesser known OS X niceties is the ability to get spelling suggestions/completions from any standard Cocoa text input. To accomplish this, simply hit the Escape key1) in any supported application (iChat, Mail, and TextEdit are some examples) and be amazed. I find this feature very useful for quickly obtaining the correct spelling of a word without taking your hands off the keyboard to get a correction. Sadly, many applications use their own text handling for various reasons so this won’t work universally (Word, TextMate, et cetera).

  1. In some cases Escape already has a bound behavior. For these situations pressing Option-Escape may give the expected dropdown. For example, in Adium the Escape key will clear your entry, but if you hit Option-Escape you will get the completion dropdown. ↩