Besides Industry Standard Formatting, the next most requested feature in Scrite was “Spell Check.” With version 0.4.2 Beta, we now have a spell check feature in place.
Scrite highlights all misspelled words using a red-shaded-background. This is distinct from what all other apps do, which is render a wavy-red-underline. We would love to do that too. Unfortunately, Qt (the UI framework we use to develop Scrite) has a bug that is yet to be fixed which affects our ability to render the wavy-red-underline. So, for now we will have to make do with a red-shaded-background.
This spell-check feature is made possible because of our use of KDE Framework 5’s Sonnet library. Sonnet abstracts spell-check functionality and delegates the actual spell-check to one or more backends. We use their inbuilt Hunspell backend for Linux and NSSpellChecker for macOS, but we have developed a custom Windows backend to make use of Microsoft’s ISpellChecker from the Windows SDK. Spell check can tend to be a processor intensive job, so we perform all spell checks in a background thread using Qt’s QtConcurrent framework. Unless you have a very old single-core PC, you shouldn’t notice lags while using the spell check feature in Scrite.
Because we use platform supplied spell-check engines, we share dictionaries used by all applications on the platform. For example, if you have added some words to dictionary using Microsoft Word; those words will be considered for spell check in Scrite and vice-versa.
Words added to “ignore list” are local the document in which you add them. Those words are not added to the platform dictionaries, but are rather stored in the current Scrite document and used only within that document.
We are starting with spell check for English language only at the moment. But the underlying spell check engine is already capable of checking for spelling mistakes in several languages. We hope to enable spell check for Indian languages in a future update.
Spell check is turned on by default, however if you wish to turn it off for some reason you can head to Application Settings and turn it off.
Take the new version 0.4.2 beta for a spin and check out the new spell check feature.