How to disable autocorrect per-app on macOS
Autocorrect can be a life saver when you’re working on something important. It not only checks if the spelling is correct but also if the word that’s been entered fits the context of whatever you’ve written. It’s the sort of thing that’s useful if you’re working in an app like Pages but not as useful if you’re using a chat client. Here’s how you can disable autocorrect per-app on macOS.
Disable autocorrect per-app
This trick works in most apps, but not all. We have a workaround if the app you want to disable autocorrect for falls in that category at the end.
Open the app that you want to disable autocorrect for. On the menu bar, go to the Edit item and select Spelling and Grammar. The sub-menu will have three options; Check Spelling While Typing, Check Grammar With Spelling, and Check Spelling Automatically.
At least one of these three options will be selected. If you click/select it again, it will be disabled. Uncheck all three items if you want and autocorrect will disabled for that app. Repeat for all the apps you want to disable autocorrect for.
In case these three options are not there, it means this is one of the apps that won’t allow you to disable autocorrect. This is where you need to use the work around and it’s not the greatest.
Open the System Preferences app, and select the Keyboard preference. Go to the Text tab and uncheck the ‘Correct spelling automatically’ option. This will disable spelling corrections. The grammar corrects will still be enabled but those aren’t as bad as the spelling corrections.
The obvious downside to this work around is that it will effect all the apps on your system. If you’re looking to use autocorrect, spell-check and all, in certain apps, you will need to enable it. To enable it, follow the same steps for disabling autocorrect but select an option so that it’s enabled.
Again, there’s a downside here; not all apps will let you enable spell check or grammar check.
The apps that have these limitations aren’t a lot and the ones that do have the limitation do so for good reason. One example of such an app is Chrome. Chrome is a browser and it’s going to be used to open all sorts of content which may, or may not, include text input. If you use it to work on documents e.g., Google Docs, you have the web app’s own spell check to back you up so the browser doesn’t need to allow autocorrect to be enabled/disabled for it.
