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Disable spell checking on Mac OS X

It drove me nuts to disable the automatic spell checking on text input fields in Mac OS X again and again to make that red lines going away on technical terms or other stuff not known by the spell checker.

Thankfully I found a post on http://dryfish.livejournal.com/8148.html which describes how to permanently disable automatic spell checking on Mac OS X.

I was going one step further and disabled all languages by renaming the whole ''Resources'' directory:

sudo mv /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources \
/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources.disabled

and creating an empty directory:

sudo mkdir /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources

Warning: Don't touch your system that way if you don't know what the meaning of the commands above is.

Nohw I'm frie tu wreite as I wand!

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Couldn't turn off the spell
By Peter (nicht überprüft) - Posted on März 18th, 2009

Couldn't turn off the spell checking in Versionsapp, never needed it so far anyway, thanks for poiting out this method.

Thanks for the tip!
By Kike (nicht überprüft) - Posted on Mai 12th, 2009

Thanks a lot for the tip. It feels good to being able to write the woy dat wi uant. Cheers, Enric

Thanks a dozen!
By Benjamin (nicht überprüft) - Posted on Juli 8th, 2009

Thanks a dozen!

Finally
By bundle (nicht überprüft) - Posted on Oktober 2nd, 2009

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

As a Web Developer those red squiggles are so annoying since none of my coding is considered "correct" by the spell check. I prefer much more to be able to check spelling when I choose to rather than have that visual noise in every document. Not all of my applications allow me to turn the feature off. So, thanks again!