Spellcheck language switcher

[geckolinux]

Hi there, would it be possible to add an item to the spellcheck context menu to change to a different language? This is important for multilingual users. Bonus points if it remembers the language for each room and/or user. Thanks!

[t3chguy]

Related #7773

[geckolinux]

Hi again, wouldn't multi-language spellchecking come along "for free" by virtue of being an Electron app? Chromium for example has this:

[t3chguy]

Yes, but the UI to manage it does not.

[SimonBrandner]

I've been looking into adding multi-language spell-check recently. This seems to be related to this issue.

UI

I would go for something similar to the way email addresses and phone numbers are handled.

Electron

Electron already seems to support this. So does the function in element-web which talks to Electron through IPC and sets the language for the spell checker. Thus implementing this in the desktop app shouldn't be problematic.

Browser

I don't really know how to implement this in the browser. Does anyone know?

Implementation

I could probably implement this, at least on the desktop. I would go about in the following way:

• Add UI as I described before. The UI would include a comment saying that it is currently supported only on the desktop. Even better would be hiding this option in the browser. Though I don't know how to check if the app is running in Electron. I'll take a look.
• Add setting for storing a list of languages to spell-check. If it would be empty the spell check could be disabled to satisfy Option to configure and disable spellcheck missing #13543.
• Add a special case for setting spell-check language in electron-main.js

This would solve this problem for the desktop app and leave space for later implementation in the browser.

Should I attempt to implement this? Even if it was only for the Desktop, for now?

[geckolinux]

Thanks a lot @SimonBrandner , I'd really appreciate any implementation, even if only for the Desktop.

I don't really know how to implement this in the browser. Does anyone know?

This might be a bit of a long stretch, but the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor has an option to allow the browser's native right-click context menu, which includes the browser's native spellchecker:

https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/general-configuration-guide/spell-checking/

Maybe you could have a look at their JS code for that? Sorry if this is a totally irrelevant suggestion.

[SimonBrandner]

browser's native right-click context menu, which includes the browser's native spellchecker

@geckolinux I think I failed to explain what I wanted to do.

The right-click menu seems to work fine for me in the browser (at least in Firefox).

What I want to implement is a spell-checker that will check multiple languages at once. Meaning it wouldn't mark any part of Hello world; Hola Mundo incorrect if I selected that I want it to check for English and Spanish.

I find this much more friendly because I sometimes use multiple languages in one message and even if I didn't the right-click menu is just not very elegant, at least not from my perspective. This also eliminates the need for having per-room spell-check language.

Electron allows for:

mainWindow.webContents.session.setSpellCheckerLanguages(languages)

where languages are an array. The thing is I don't know how to do this in the browser. I don't even know if it is possible. The browser has a similar thing but it dosn'ŧ accept an array, at least I don't think it does.

[SimonBrandner]

I made a draft PR.

[SimonBrandner]

The PR is ready

[geckolinux]

Nice! Thank you very much!