Sunday 20 March 2016

On Misbehaving Find-and-Replace Fields

A system-wide spellchecker with autocorrect is a wonderful thing to help you type, but it’s not so great in the text fields of a find-and-replace window.


Quite often when I want to find-and-possibly-replace a piece of text in a word processor, it’s either a typo or a somewhat specialised term that the spellchecker doesn’t know. You guessed it, that leads to:

Text field with text “ivis” and suggested replacement “iris”

If you’re not paying attention well enough to click the cross or press the Esc key in time, you’ll find yourself searching for:—

Text field in which the text “ivis” has been automatically replaced by “iris”

No, text field, I do want to search for “ivis” and not “iris” — why is not your concern, it’s mine. So now I have to go back and change it.

The Solution


Luckily, it’s very simple to get round this: all you do is switch off autocorrect for the offending text field. Just right-click anywhere in it, go to Spelling and Grammar in the menu that opens, and click on “Correct Spelling Automatically” to uncheck it.

The menu in which to turn off auto-correct

(Note that the screenshot above shows what the menu looks like before you turn autocorrect off.)

You need to do this separately for each text field that’s giving you this trouble. Also, it works not just for find-and-replace windows, but just about any text field in all of OS X — with the usual exceptions of applications made by Adobe and Microsoft.

Two notes, though: first, in a find-and-replace window like that above, with separate Simple and Advanced tabs, toggling autocorrect for the Find or Replace field on one tab doesn’t affect the other because they’re separate text fields. Second, the application doesn’t remember this setting, so if you quit and later restart it, it will happily “correct” you again.

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