Forums Feature Suggestions Spell Check!

Oh, please please please!

I have been a supporter and user of mIRC for YEARS and would just love to have a little checkbox of some sort that checks what I just typed before I send it.

There are some add-ons out there that claim to do that, but I simply don't trust them.

Is this something that could be added with a future version release? It would be very simple to add a dictionary (see http://editplus.com/download.html and how EditPlus allows you to install a dictionary to their excellent editor).

No Spell Check! Oh, please please please!

mIRC is not used only by English users. Adding dictionary support would require adding support for many languages. This is likely not going to happen, though I can't speak for what Khaled decides to do. It has been mentioned in the past, so he knows of the small number of users who want it (or at least only a small number are vocal about it) who want it. If he feels like it would be worth adding, then it's mostly likely already on his list of things to do.

Scripts that offer dictionary support usually offer it one of two ways. Either they include a dictionary file (or files) for one or more languages that can be used. These can greatly increase the script file size, but can work fairly well. The other option is to connect to a website and use it to determine if words are spelled correctly. This requires a lot of web connecting to check everything typed and really isn't very good for performance as it can be slow depending on the site you're using. Depending on the site, this can allow access to any number of languages, however. It also doesn't need a dictionary file for each language, so the file size of the script is much smaller. So there is good and bad.

In any case, chat is like IM -- in that it doesn't need to have correct spelling. Few people care about it in chat.

Not only has there been times in the past when this feature has been asked for but on an equal number of times the suggestion has been either shot down or arguments have developed over the required amount of work to implement it, the number of different languages that would have to be catered for, the number of versions of English and what version of English would be the best to include, etc.

Whilst I usually chat the same way I type anywhere else, with capital letters, correct grammar and spelling, etc, I agree with what others have said here and elsewhere - not enough people care about the presentation of their 'chats' to be bothered with a spell check function.

For this reason and others, I think there are other priorities.

Unless you're insecure of your spelling, you should really take on reading and writing. They help to improve your vocabulary skill tremendously. Every one of us makes misspellings from time to time, but I think it's better when you have to deal with those people who use jargon, lingo, abbreviations or whatnot.

how about this as a medium ground: make support for dictionary files already existing? I know Forte Agent a news reader for those not familiar with it) is used in many languages and IIRC (I dont use it anymore - no usenet) they had language packs which included dictionaries - why not tap into something like that? This way, there is SUPPORT for it, but it's 1) not default 2)n tap into existing files. And yes, I know there's TONS of programs that have dictionaries - that's the beauty of it - support the FILES and nothing else - this way coding is at a minimal

The files are supported with scripting already. You only need to know the format of the file. There likely isn't a single standard for the format of those files and if mIRC itself supports one format and then the people maintaining those files stops maintaining them, then it would require mIRC to be updated to support a different file format. Better to have a script do that imo. Especially with the very small number of people interested in spell checks in IRC. There is just too much shorthand in IRC to make spell checking worth doing.

well, if we rule out acronyms, the job gets much easier true, and you're right of course, it's easily scripted AND as you state, multiple dictionaries out there. I think with a simple use "X" file for dictionary it would eliminate the multiple extension issue and if the requirement was it could be read like a txt/ini/mrc file it could be easier........ however, there's the scripted option, my comment was more to take as much legwork OUT of the project as possible for Khaled IF he decided to do t, yanno?

This is what people are asking for (I assume).

that's what I figured as well and that wasnt in question - it was the implementation that people had differing opinions of

That would be great. There's a video on youtube with someone doing that on mIRC but it doesn't say how.

Using scripts slows things down and I don't know of any way to do inline spell checking like that.

Why not just have support for aspell (http://aspell.net/) which has support for many languages and can be installed only if the users want it?

As for spell check dictionary, IE7+, Firefox(not sure, but was an earlier version), Chrome(sence the release), opera(not sure the version), all support the same dictionary format. Why not tap into those. I mean, if the user already has a dictionary installed, wouldn't it just be easier to tap into that?

If you have MS Word or later installed you can use this snippet I wrote: http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/8748/

As a paid user I fully support this. There is no reason why the author should be overly concerned about supporting different languages when that's the job of the spellcheck library, use aspel or hunspell as notepad++, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Firefox & Thunderbird and Google Chrome either are doing, or have used in the past, and let the users download the languages they want seperately themselves.

I totally agree, that mIRC should have a built-in spell checker.

I understand that it takes time to implement spell checking in mIRC, but I do hope to see such feature one day in mIRC.

And for now, until mIRC gets a built-in spell checker, people can use:

1. SpellCheck v1.1 by asus69:

http://www.mircscripts.org/comments.php?cid=2339

2. mIRC Spelling & Grammar Check script by SReject:

http://hawkee.com/snippet/8748
http://forum.swiftirc.net/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=24945