Tip: Best Way to Fix OS X’s Autocorrect? Turn It Off
Let’s get right to teh point: I’d rather live with the occasional dumb typo than have OS X’s humorless and militant autocorrect stomping all over my words. You should too.
What has this feature done to earn its eviction? The automatic spelling-correction that Apple added with 2011’s OS X Lion got a lot pushier with 2014’s OS X Yosemite. It has now ascended to a level of intrusiveness and cluelessness that makes Microsoft Office’s long-gone Clippy assistant look like a gifted ghostwriter.
First, OS X’s spell-check ignores capitalized words, resulting in such acts of brand assassination as turning “Etsy” to “Easy” and “Roku” to “Rook.” It’s done the same to people’s names, rewriting the Federal Communications Commission’s Mignon Clyburn into a nonexistent “Mignon Cleburne.”
(Among lowercase words, OS X’s principal failing is a fuddy-duddy unfamiliarity with Internet slang that revises “dadcore” to “daycare” and “stabby” to “stubby”.)
Second, overriding these substitutions demands tedious thumb-wrestling. The standard Command-Z Undo command doesn’t work; hitting the Esc key and typing what you meant the first time around only repeats the auto-correct. Instead, here is Apple’s own advice on how to override its confounded copy editing: “To revert to your original spelling, put the insertion point after the word to show your original spelling, then choose your spelling.”
A few months ago, I decided I’d had enough of OS X’s autocorrect. My solution: I turned it off, and I think you should too. To do so, as the screenshot above shows: Open System Preferences (from the Apple menu), select Keyboard, open the Text tab, and click to clear the checkbox next to Correct spelling automatically.
Ta-da! Your welcome.
Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
