[BUG] Spell checking cannot be turned off, making all entered text hard to read
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code
What's Wrong?
Re-opened version of #35706
I have a German Windows installation and am not going to change that. Claude Desktop's UI translation is so poor that I had to switch to English. Also, when coding, it's often easier to express things in English, so I'm typing in that language.
The problem is that now all of my typed text has a thick red underline. Almost every single word is marked a wrong in such an intense way that it's really distracting to read anything in there. I know this issue from Microsoft Outlook and Teams where I'm typing in both German and English and either language is always unrecognised. How stupid.
So please let me turn this spell checking off in Claude Desktop and make the app usable again. I'm not writing an executive announcement here, just chatting with the AI that would understand me anyway. So a totally uncritical feature causes a critical usability degrading here. That's not justifyable.
What Should Happen?
No spell checking
Error Messages/Logs
Steps to Reproduce
Run Claude Desktop and type in a different language than your Windows installation
Claude Model
None
Is this a regression?
I don't know
Last Working Version
_No response_
Claude Code Version
Claude 1.6608.2 (ebf1a1) 2026-05-08T23:17:27.000Z
Platform
Anthropic API
Operating System
Windows
Terminal/Shell
Other
Additional Information
<img width="1247" height="83" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f2525bc9-a025-4acc-9d90-b54a5e0cf730" />
Spell checking is broken anyway because the non-underlined words are not correct German either (except for "in").
Edit: Workaround
Here's a workaround from the comments below, so everybody finding this issue (incl. future me) can correct it manually:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58693#issuecomment-4928512488
Showing cached comments. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗
7 Comments
Please find below a list of Claude's suggestions that did NOT work for me:
<img width="1548" height="905" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/605dde7d-ba76-4ba0-97ac-aa5f8241983a" />
<img width="1560" height="751" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a77d0d96-cc68-4fed-b645-94ff2545e5cc" />
This happens in macos, too. MacOS version 15.7.7 (24G720)
In systems settings > Keyboard > Input Sources > Text Input "Correct spelling automatically" is already disabled.
The red lines still appear in In Claude 1.11187.4 (584005) 2026-06-05T20:15:04.000Z
Since I am frequently switching between languages and using all kinds of lingo, spell-checking is more of a nuisance then a help.
Adding a third gap not yet covered here: no correction suggestions.
The input field currently underlines misspelled words but right-clicking
offers no spelling suggestions — making the spell checker a passive
annoyance rather than a useful tool, especially for multilingual users
writing in a language different from their OS locale.
This is directly tied to the two gaps already tracked in this issue:
if the correct dictionary is active
Proposed UX: standard right-click context menu on underlined words
with ranked suggestions from the active dictionary.
Electron ships Chromium's spellcheck engine which natively supports this —
it's already the default behavior in VS Code, Slack, and Notion.
The underlining is there; surfacing suggestions is the missing last step.
Suggested config (aligned with the proposals above):
\``
json``"spellcheck": {
"enabled": true,
"languages": ["en-US", "fr-FR"]
}
\
Environment: Windows 11, Claude Code Desktop
Same in Czech language, I can't simply turn it off :-(
Add cz dict, az shown here
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/60012#issuecomment-4911823918
Or without a script: close all Claude processes, open %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Claude_pzs8sxrjxfjjc\LocalCache\Roaming\Claude\Preferences, add "en-US" to the spellcheck.dictionaries-array
still not fixed on Claude Desktop for Windows.