Zulip-desktop: Add a settiing to change spellchecker language

[ghost]

Zulip doesn't follow the OS spellchecker language setting on opening, it uses the language set in:
Settings > Display settings > Default language

Currently there is only a single 'English' language option, which is US English. If the OS spellchecker language is set to 'British English', then Zulip's spellchecking is different when the application is opened.

If the OS spellchecker language in the OS system preferences is changed away from and then back to 'British English' with the Zulip application open, the spellchecker language in Zulip then matches that of the OS.

Please either include a 'British English' option for the default language setting in Zulip, or allow the application to detect and follow the OS spellchecker language when it is opened.

• Operating System:
  
  
  
  • [ ] Windows
  
  
  • [ ] Linux/Ubutnu
  
  
  • [x] macOS
  
  

• Clear steps to reproduce the issue:
• Open the Zulip application.
• Set the default language to 'English'.
• Close Zulip.
• Set the OS spellchecker language to 'British English' in the system preferences.
• Open Zulip, the spellchecker language in the application will still be US English.
• Change the OS spellchecker language away from and back to 'British English'. Zulip will now be using the same spellchecker language as the OS.

[akashnimare]

Okay, got it. I think adding a separate spellchecker language option in the setting would be a good idea here. Something like this (have a dropdown and let user choose the app + spellchercker language)

[snomos]

I think adding a separate spellchecker language option in the setting would be a good idea here.

Very much supported. Attached is a screen shot showing the result of writing in Norwegian (the suggestions are definitely not Norwegian):

[rrhythmsharma]

@zulipbot claim

[akashnimare]

@rrhythmsharma let me know if you need any help, most probably we want to have a dropdown for the spellchecker languages.

[zulipbot]

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[akashnimare]

@timabbott thoughts on this? Our current model auto-detects the language Settings > Display settings > Default language. This works well for most of the users though a few users have requested a feature to change this language setting option. Should we change it and implement this?

[snomos]

Please do. In multilingual scenarios the present solution does not work at all, and in all cases where the preferred speller language is different from the UI language it does not work either (recall that macOS is available in ~30 languages, Windows and Linux in a few more, whereas there are about 7000 languages in the world – even if just 1% of these where preferred by Zulip users, that would still be more than double the available languages in macOS).

[timabbott]

Yes, I think we should implement an option for this. We can just have the default value be "auto-detect" (doing the current behavior), but users should definitely be able to override that.

We probably need this to be a per-organization setting, too, since some users may use a different language in one organization from another.

[rrhythmsharma]

@akashnimare can I start working on this

[akashnimare]

@tom-sonnox we have improved this behaviour in https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop/commit/427c86afafaa048e189c3593afeb962c021e79a0. The next stable release will have this fix.

[snomos]

May I ask why the issue was closed? Even though it is an improvement for some/many users, it is not a working solution for users writing in languages not supported by the UI or by autodetection (and autodetection is never reliable in my experience). Having an explicit override/manual speller language setting is the only working solution in this scenario, as has been pointed out - including with an implementation suggestion - above. An alternative solution would be to use system speller services, including the system method for selecting speller language (follow input language on windows, follow user setting in speller dialog on the mac; I am sure that Linux has something similar).

[kanishk98]

@snomos thanks for reaching out. Let me try to address your concerns here:

it is not a working solution for users writing in languages not supported by the UI or by autodetection

We've included all languages supported by Chromium in the auto-detection feature. Since we cannot include a hard override for a language that doesn't fall into this category, we're not missing out on anything here.

(and autodetection is never reliable in my experience).

We had similar concerns when working on this feature, but it's worked fairly well for us so far, and you can check out the discussion here.
Since we've only pushed this to master so far and not packaged it into a release, we're hoping that people using the latest builds will report problems, if any. I'd love it if you could point out some bugs too.

We've already built a hard override for all orgs in the app, and we can always switch back to that if this approach doesn't work with users. We figured this would be a much simpler setting, and a sensible default.

Please reopen the issue if you do find problems with the feature.