How do you change which language the built in Spell Checker uses in Visual Studio 2022?

Question

I've recently updated my Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 to version Version 17.5.2 and now get loads of spelling errors.

Is there a way to change the spell checker to use British English?

The flood of warnings for "Spelling error - Colour is not a word" is not helpful at all.

My windows language and region settings are set to English (United Kingdom).

Mikvah

developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/… – Grobe

Answer 1

You can configure the spell checker through an .editorconfig file, as stated in the blog post about the spell checker here:

spelling_languages = _language_[,_language_]
(Example: = en-us,fr-fr)

I believe in your case, you want it to be:

spelling_languages = en-gb

The documentation also states the proper language pack must be installed, or it won't work (sounds like you already have that taken care of):

Note that the fr-fr language pack must be installed on the user’s machine or Visual Studio will incorrectly flag any French words as spelling errors.

Bayern

I have tried that but it had no effect. Still complains about colour. I can only see a single language pack for English, there are not different English versions. – Mikvah

@Mikvah an alternative may be to use the spelling_exclusion_path which allows you to specify a .dic file of words that should be ignored. This might not be ideal if you have a lot of words to add, but I can only think of a handful of words that are spelt different between US and GB English. – Bayern

For anyone try it should be "spelling_languages" not "spelling_lanaguages" – Pilferage

I don't know how to change the language, but you can at least switch it off (and on) in visual studio (tested on Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 (64-bit) Version 17.5.4) under edit/advanced/toggle text spell checker. – Rothman

Sorry for the delayed response but "spelling_languages = en-gb" worked with the correct spelling ^^ – Mikvah

Answer 2

Windows needs to have the correct language pack installed.

Use powershell to get things set up and restart visual studio.

PS C:\> Install-Language en-gb

I found out that the .editorconfig parser is quite picky, try to start with a minimal version like that:

[*]
spelling_languages = en-US,en-GB
spelling_exclusion_path = .\exclusion.dic

Midvictorian

Windows is set to UK English, Visual Studio is still complaining about my English spelling of colour. – Mikvah

Just to be certain. Powershell command PS C:\> Get-InstalledLanguage does list something like (containing en-US): Language Language Packs Language Features -------- -------------- ----------------- de-AT None TextToSpeech de-DE LpCab, LXP BasicTyping, Handwriting, Speech, TextToSpeech, OCR en-US LpCab BasicTyping, Handwriting, Speech, TextToSpeech, OCR In my case adding "en-US" was sufficent to get "Colour" and "Color" passing spell checking. – Midvictorian

Works great on my laptop, but what do I do on the terminal server, where these cmdlets are not supported? Their documentation explicitly states These cmdlets are supported on client operating system only. (taken from learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/…) – Agnail