Expose settings for spellchecking in app settings (Windows Desktop)

Open 💬 9 comments Opened May 31, 2026 by VOOM108

What variant of Codex are you using?

App Windows

What feature would you like to see?

Please make spellchecking an optional switch on/off in Codex App settings.

Any additional options would be welcome, but being able to turn it off would go a long way already.

Currently, spellchecking seems to be fixed, always on, and using the Windows UI language.

Even if:
Spellchecking is off in Windows
Codex App UI is set to English
But Windows UI is German

..spellchecking will assume German and add red squiggly lines to all English words.

I write in both languages, but mostly English in Codex. It really is no fun to have squiggly lines jump into your face under every word, pulling attention from the actual text.

Additional information

I can make changes to the C:\Users\Giesen\AppData\Local\Packages\OpenAI.Codex_2p2nqsd0c76g0\LocalCache\Roaming\Codex\web\Codex\Default\Preferences file, but that will probably be switched back with every update.

"de-DE","de","en-US","en" even checks both languages in the same prompt. Only there are no suggestions, but I can live with that.

View original on GitHub ↗

9 Comments

188080501 · 1 month ago

Please add a toggle to disable spellchecking in the Codex prompt box. This is a programming-oriented input field, and underlining file paths, identifiers, commands, and code-like text as spelling mistakes is distracting rather than helpful.

mrbeardad · 1 month ago

any progress?

vidarb · 1 month ago

I too would very much like to be able to turn off the spell checker. Almost every word I write gets the red squiggly lines. Setting the Codex UI to English does not help. It is a real nuisance!

GyllenByte · 1 month ago

It's very distracting and the settings expose no feature to toggle it off. What a worthless irritating and redundant feature, moreso because every LLM can perfectly infer the prompt even if its littered with a thousand typos. Holy shit

OlivierPetchy · 1 month ago

I can confirm this also happens on Windows 10 with French as the Windows display language.

In my case:

Windows display language: French
Codex app language : English
I write mostly in English inside Codex
Changing Windows keyboard/input language to English did not fix it
Codex kept spellchecking as French and underlining almost every English word

Workaround that fixed it:

Close Codex fully, then edit: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Codex\web\Codex\Default\Preferences
I changed "spellcheck":{"dictionaries":["fr-FR","fr"],"dictionary":""} into "spellcheck":{"dictionaries":["en-US","en","fr-FR","fr"],"dictionary":"en-US"}
English words stopped being underlined

So yes, a Codex setting for:

spellcheck on/off
spellcheck language(s)

would be very useful, especially for bilingual users.

dachent · 1 month ago

Cross-linking the narrower bug report/update for the related “no suggestions” behavior: #26478.

I confirmed the empty-suggestions symptom still reproduces on Windows Desktop package OpenAI.Codex_26.609.9530.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0 / runtime 149.0.7827.54, with Windows en-US spellchecking enabled and Codex Chromium preferences set to en-US,en. The detailed environment, bundle inspection, and likely fix direction are here: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/26478#issuecomment-4720011491

This issue still seems valuable as the broader product request for spellcheck settings: on/off and language selection. #26478 is the narrower functional bug where spellcheck detects a misspelled word but dictionarySuggestions is empty.

Qiqayon · 12 days ago

To disable spell checking: find the Preferences file. Change the "spellcheck" section so that it reads: "spellcheck":{"dictionaries":[],"dictionary":"","use_spelling_service":false}

CherryDT · 8 days ago

"Find the Preferences file" - where is said file?

Qiqayon · 7 days ago

"Find the Preferences file" - where is said file?

I highly recommend installing Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/), which answered this question for me.
On my system, Preferences is in C:\Users\«me»\AppData\Local\Packages\OpenAI.Codex_2p2nqsd0c76g0\LocalCache\Roaming\Codex\web\Codex\Default, where «me» is my username.