Why does the Slack app think I'm British?

Question

Firefox has stopped insisting that there's a "u" in "neighbour", though it periodically reverts to thinking I'm British. But the Slack app can't be told otherwise. Is there some kind of system-wide setting I should be using?

I'm using the official beta.

This question: How to use American English spelling dictionary in Firefox? seems to suggest that I should remove the myspell-en-au myspell-en-gb myspell-en-za packages which I'm happy to do but I don't see myspell-en-us installed at all and at least Firefox definitely has English (United States)

When I do cat /etc/default/locale it definitely knows I'm American: LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

So is this an issue with Slack? Or is there a setting elsewhere that I should be looking at?

Solution 1

This turned out to be a Slack bug. I addressed it by removing myspell-en_AU but the real fix is for Slack to fix their code. They're working on that.

Solution 2

This is a bug in Slack, which their support confirmed to me in an email exchange. If you want U.S. English checks in Slack, then go to your OS language preferences (on OSX, this is under System Preferences->Keyboard->Text->Spelling), disable all languages except U.S. English, and Slack will use that dictionary. Specifying more than one dictionary makes Slack fall back to English (UK), even if that isn't among the selected languages.

Obviously, you are going to lose spelling support for any other languages in all other Applications, so if you write a lot of Emails in Spanish or French, this may no be a solution that works for you. Equally, if you use more than one language in Slack, you have to pick one to get spelling support for, and disable spell-check support on any teams where you don't use English.

In other words: All of these are ill-fitting workarounds, and the problem needs to be fixed by Slack's engineers.

Solution 3

The hunspell-en-us package does not include myspell symlinks like other hunspell-* packages do. Possibly this is a bug.

I built the package in my PPA with the missing symlinks.

https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/+archive/ubuntu/misc

To figure out if this explains it, I suggest that you install hunspell-en-us from my PPA.

Comments

[Admin]

Are you using the official Slack for Linux beta?

[Admin]

hunspell-en-us ought to be installed and allow you to choose American English for spellchecking.

[Admin]

@seth I am, indeed.

[Admin]

@GunnarHjalmarsson hunspell-en-us is, indeed installed. Other apps seem to use it.

[Admin]

Please post the output of locale, the locale envrionment variable read to set the language is totally up to the application, I guess Slack is reading something not set to en_US.UTF-8.

[Admin]

@kos locale is def all en_US

[Admin]

I have the opposite problem. Slack thinks I'm American.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

@Amanda: Did you possibly try this?

[Amanda]

I'm afraid that I am/was wary of adding arbitrary PPAs.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

@Amanda: Ok, no problem, even if it had been interesting to see if it made a difference. At the same time I see that Slack has acknowledged it as a bug on their side.

[machineghost]

For what it's worth I removed that package, and every other myspell-en* and hunspell-en* package except hunspell-en-us, restarted slack, and ... it was still still using British/Canadian/Australian English. So then I installed myspell-en_US (removing hunspell-en-us), restarted again, and ... no luck :( It seems they made the bug worse in later versions of the app, and now the (wrong) spellchecking seems to be hard-coded.

[machineghost]

I take that back: it turned out the problem was just that closing and re-opening Slack wasn't enough to make it recognize the proper dictionary. After I fixed the packages AND did a killall slack (and then ran ps aux | grep slack, saw one process still open, and used kill *that process ID* to kill it) Slack finally started using a "proper" (ie. American) dictionary.

[theanine]

@machineghost thanks! Removing all those packages and installing myspell-en_US worked for me!

[Amanda]

You might want to read the accepted answer. :)