Google Spell Check

a Sublime Text package

Package Control: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Google%20Spell%20Check

Description

Use Google magic to fix spelling. Select some text (or just put the cursor on a word), run the command, and the text is silently replaced with Google's recommended spelling. If Google has no clear correction, your text is left alone.

Google has a far better spell checker than most tools:

1. Frequency — Google sees misspellings all day long, so it knows what you probably meant
2. Names — company names like flikr or tumblr, or scifi author jon sculzi → john scalzi; typical checkers look one word at a time and have no idea
3. Unlimited dictionary — kubernetes, hackathons, craigslist
4. Context — the whole phrase is considered, not each word alone
5. It just works — Sublime's built-in checker has no idea what to do with avalible, finanicals, maitenence

The Commands

Command	What it does
Google Spell Check: Fix	Replaces the misspellings, silently, and touches nothing else
Google Spell Check: Fix and Highlight	Replaces them and marks each one, so you can see what it changed
Google Spell Check: Highlight Only	Marks what it would change and touches nothing
Google Spell Check: Clear Highlights	Removes the marks

How to Use

1. Select some text, or put the cursor on a word
2. Run Google Spell Check: Fix
   • right-click context menu → Google Spell Check: Fix
   • Command Palette (ctrl+shift+p / cmd+shift+p) → Google Spell Check: Fix
   • or a key binding of your own — see below
3. The status bar shows progress, then the corrections it made

Multiple cursors/selections are all checked in one go. Capitalization is preserved (Avalible → Available, AVALIBLE → AVAILABLE).

Fix changes nothing but the spelling — your selection and any existing highlights are left as they were. To see what it changed, use Fix and Highlight instead: same edits, but each correction gets squiggled and annotated.

If nothing changes, Google thinks your spelling is fine. Select more words to give it context.

Context matters, so select whole phrases. dustr on its own corrects to nothing — Google only offers brand names for it. In context it resolves differently and correctly: feather dustr → feather duster, clean the dustr → clean the dust. Words run together are fixed too (anotherone → another one).

Highlight Only (look before you leap)

Google Spell Check: Highlight Only does the same lookups but never modifies the buffer. Each misspelled word gets a squiggly underline, a gutter dot, and an inline annotation at the right edge showing the correction it would have made — only the bad words are marked, not everything you selected.

That's the one to use on anything that isn't prose. Run the plain command over code and Google will cheerfully "correct" identifiers like const or EN; Highlight Only shows you that first instead of rewriting the file.

1. Select some text (or the whole file with ctrl+a / cmd+a)
2. Run Google Spell Check: Highlight Only — right-click menu or Command Palette
3. Read the annotations, then either fix things yourself or run Google Spell Check: Fix on just the selections you agree with

Clear the marks with Google Spell Check: Clear Highlights, or click the x at the right edge of the annotations.

Key Binding

No key binding is claimed by default, so nothing of yours gets clobbered. The suggested one lives in Example.sublime-keymap, which Sublime never loads — open it via Preferences → Package Settings → Google Spell Check → Example Key Bindings (or the Command Palette → Preferences: Google Spell Check Example Key Bindings) and copy this line to the right-hand User side:

{ "keys": ["ctrl+alt+g"], "command": "google_spell_check" },
{ "keys": ["ctrl+alt+shift+g"], "command": "google_spell_check_fix_highlight" },
{ "keys": ["ctrl+alt+h"], "command": "google_spell_check_highlight" },

How It Works

This uses Google's public autocomplete/suggest endpoint (suggestqueries.google.com), which returns explicit spell-correction metadata — Google marks "you typed X, I think you meant Y". That flag is what makes silent replacement safe: without it, the plugin doesn't touch your text.

When Google doesn't flag anything, a suggestion is accepted only if it reads as a respelling — same word count, small per-word edit distance, same first letter. This is what stops Google from "correcting" receive into received, or the quick brown fox into the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Some misspellings are invisible at phrase level: for additionassl microcontrollers Google only offers to extend the phrase, though additionassl alone corrects cleanly. So when the phrase as a whole yields no correction, each word is checked on its own (words under 4 characters are skipped, punctuation and spacing are preserved).

No API key required. It isn't an officially supported API, so Google changing their response format could break the plugin.

Tests

tests/test_correct.py runs the correction logic against the live endpoint, stubbing the sublime modules so the plugin imports outside the editor:

py tests/test_correct.py

Needs a network connection. Covers misspellings that must be corrected, correctly spelled text that must be left untouched, case preservation, and offline input guards.

Installation

• Package Control (recommended): Package Control: Install Package → Google Spell Check
• Manual: clone into your Sublime Packages folder

  git clone https://github.com/noahcoad/SublimeGoogleSpellCheck.git "Google Spell Check"

Requires Sublime Text 4 (build 4107+). The package ships a .python-version of 3.8, so it runs in ST4's 3.8 plugin host — ST3's 3.3 host lacks html.unescape.

Update Notices

• 2026-09-19 (v2.2.1), Fix is back to touching nothing but the spelling — v2.2.0 briefly had it move your selection onto the corrected words. If you want to see what changed, that's what Fix and Highlight is for.
• 2026-09-19 (v2.2.0), three new commands and a clearer naming: the original command is now Google Spell Check: Fix in the palette (the command name google_spell_check is unchanged, so existing key bindings keep working), joined by Fix and Highlight, Highlight Only, and Clear Highlights. See The Commands and Highlight Only. Only the misspelled words are marked rather than the whole selection, the status bar lists the corrections, and words run together (anotherone → another one) are now fixed.
• 2026-09-08 (v2.1.0), Package Control housekeeping: added a LICENSE, started shipping .python-version (it was accidentally gitignored, which would have left an installed copy in the 3.3 plugin host), added the Preferences menu, and stopped claiming ctrl+alt+g by default — it now ships commented out for you to opt into. See Key Binding.
• 2026-07-27 (v2.0.0), rewritten for Python 3 / ST4. The old version scraped the Google search results page for "Did you mean" — Google removed that markup, so it silently stopped working. Now uses the suggest endpoint's spell-correction metadata, falls back to per-word checking, checks all selections at once, preserves case and spacing, and reports connection failures instead of failing quietly. The st2 and st3 branches are retired; everything lives on master.
• 2013-10-14, Sublime Text 3 version added.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Finally

See also: Open URL, another Sublime package.

Author: @noahcoad writes software for the heck of it and to make life just a little more efficient.