# Google Spell Check
a Sublime Text package

Package Control: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Google%20Spell%20Check

## Description
Use Google magic to fix spelling. Select some text (or just put the cursor on a word), run the command, and the text is silently replaced with Google's recommended spelling. If Google has no clear correction, **your text is left alone**.

Google has a far better spell checker than most tools:

1. **Frequency** — Google sees misspellings all day long, so it knows what you probably meant
1. **Names** — company names like `flikr` or `tumblr`, or scifi author `jon sculzi` → `john scalzi`; typical checkers look one word at a time and have no idea
1. **Unlimited dictionary** — `kubernetes`, `hackathons`, `craigslist`
1. **Context** — the whole phrase is considered, not each word alone
1. **It just works** — Sublime's built-in checker has no idea what to do with `avalible`, `finanicals`, `maitenence`

## How to Use
1. Select some text, or put the cursor on a word
1. Run **Google Spell Check**
	* right-click context menu → Google Spell Check
	* Command Palette (`ctrl+shift+p` / `cmd+shift+p`) → Google Spell Check
	* or a key binding of your own — see below
1. The status bar shows progress, then the correction

Multiple cursors/selections are all checked in one go. Capitalization is preserved (`Avalible` → `Available`, `AVALIBLE` → `AVAILABLE`).

If nothing changes, Google thinks your spelling is fine. Select more words to give it context.

## Key Binding
No key binding is claimed by default, so nothing of yours gets clobbered. The suggested one lives in `Example.sublime-keymap`, which Sublime never loads — open it via **Preferences → Package Settings → Google Spell Check → Example Key Bindings** (or the Command Palette → *Preferences: Google Spell Check Example Key Bindings*) and copy this line to the right-hand User side:

```json
{ "keys": ["ctrl+alt+g"], "command": "google_spell_check" },
```

## How It Works
This uses Google's public autocomplete/suggest endpoint (`suggestqueries.google.com`), which returns explicit spell-correction metadata — Google marks *"you typed X, I think you meant Y"*. That flag is what makes silent replacement safe: without it, the plugin doesn't touch your text.

When Google doesn't flag anything, a suggestion is accepted only if it reads as a respelling — same word count, small per-word edit distance, same first letter. This is what stops Google from "correcting" `receive` into `received`, or `the quick brown fox` into `the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog`.

Some misspellings are invisible at phrase level: for `additionassl microcontrollers` Google only offers to extend the phrase, though `additionassl` alone corrects cleanly. So when the phrase as a whole yields no correction, each word is checked on its own (words under 4 characters are skipped, punctuation and spacing are preserved).

No API key required. It isn't an officially supported API, so Google changing their response format could break the plugin.

## Tests
`tests/test_correct.py` runs the correction logic against the live endpoint, stubbing the `sublime` modules so the plugin imports outside the editor:

```bash
py tests/test_correct.py
```

Needs a network connection. Covers misspellings that must be corrected, correctly spelled text that must be left untouched, case preservation, and offline input guards.

## Installation
* **Package Control** (recommended): `Package Control: Install Package` → **Google Spell Check**
* **Manual**: clone into your Sublime `Packages` folder
  ```bash
  git clone https://github.com/noahcoad/SublimeGoogleSpellCheck.git "Google Spell Check"
  ```

Requires **Sublime Text 4** (build 4107+). The package ships a `.python-version` of `3.8`, so it runs in ST4's 3.8 plugin host — ST3's 3.3 host lacks `html.unescape`.

## Update Notices
* *2026-09-08* (**v2.1.0**), Package Control housekeeping: added a `LICENSE`, started shipping `.python-version` (it was accidentally gitignored, which would have left an installed copy in the 3.3 plugin host), added the Preferences menu, and stopped claiming `ctrl+alt+g` by default — it now ships commented out for you to opt into. See [Key Binding](#key-binding).
* *2026-07-27* (**v2.0.0**), rewritten for Python 3 / ST4. The old version scraped the Google search results page for "Did you mean" — Google removed that markup, so it silently stopped working. Now uses the suggest endpoint's spell-correction metadata, falls back to per-word checking, checks all selections at once, preserves case and spacing, and reports connection failures instead of failing quietly. The `st2` and `st3` branches are retired; everything lives on `master`.
* *2013-10-14*, Sublime Text 3 version added.

## License
MIT — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).

## Finally
See also: [Open URL](https://github.com/noahcoad/SublimeOpenUrl), another Sublime package.

Author: [@noahcoad](http://twitter.com/noahcoad) writes software for the heck of it and to make life just a little more efficient.