Let’s
get right to teh point: I’d rather live with the occasional dumb typo
than have OS X’s humorless and militant autocorrect stomping all over my
words. You should too.
What
has this feature done to earn its eviction? The automatic
spelling-correction that Apple added with 2011’s OS X Lion got a lot
pushier with 2012’s OS X Yosemite. It has now ascended to a level of
intrusiveness and cluelessness that makes Microsoft Office’s long-gone
Clippy assistant look like a gifted ghostwriter.
First, OS X’s spell-check ignores capitalized words, resulting in such acts of brand assassination as turning “Etsy” to “Easy” and “Roku” to “Rook.”
It’s done the same to people’s names, rewriting the Federal
Communications Commission’s Mignon Clyburn into a nonexistent “Mignon
Cleburne.”
(Among lowercase words, OS X’s principal failing is a fuddy-duddy unfamiliarity with Internet slang that revises “dadcore” to “daycare” and “stabby” to “stubby”.)
Second,
overriding these substitutions demands tedious thumb-wrestling. The
standard Command-Z Undo command doesn’t work; hitting the Esc key and
typing what you meant the first time around only repeats the
auto-correct. Instead, here is Apple’s own advice on how to override its confounded copy editing:
“To revert to your original spelling, put the insertion point after the
word to show your original spelling, then choose your spelling.”
A
few months ago, I decided I’d had enough of OS X’s autocorrect. My
solution: I turned it off, and I think you should too. To do so, as the
screenshot above shows: Open System Preferences (from the Apple menu), select Keyboard, open the Text tab, and click to clear the checkbox next to Correct spelling automatically.
Ta-da! Your welcome.
