Spellcheck: English and Brazilian Portuguese in every app

The conversation is in pt-BR and the code is in en-US, so every text box has to accept both at once. There is no global switch on Linux: each app family has its own engine and reads its languages from its own place. So there is ONE list, my.spellcheck.languages in modules/nixos/desktop/spellcheck.nix (BCP 47 tags, rule 11), and one layer per family reads it.

Before (measured 03/11/2026)Copy Anchor Link

spellcheck.dictionaries in each Chromium/Electron Preferences:

/run/current-system/sw/share/hunspell existed and was EMPTY: no system app had a dictionary.

The layersCopy Anchor Link

hunspell dictionariesCopy Anchor Link

hunspellDicts.<lang> for each language, in environment.systemPackages, so they land in /run/current-system/sw/share/hunspell; DICPATH points there. Enchant (behind GTK's gspell and libspelling) and Gecko both honor DICPATH. No enchant.ordering is declared: the default one already falls through to hunspell/nuspell for every language we use.

Check: enchant-lsmod-2 -list-dicts lists en_US and pt_BR.

Gecko (Zen, LibreWolf)Copy Anchor Link

spellchecker.dictionary takes a comma-separated list (en-US,pt-BR) since Firefox 98, and the dictionaries themselves come from DICPATH. Zen gets it as a Preferences policy (the same extraPolicies block as the start page), LibreWolf as a defaultPref in extraPrefs. Both are DEFAULTS and not locked: the context menu can still toggle a language for the session.

A page that declares its own lang wins over the pref: Gecko checks that page in its language only. That is upstream behavior, not something a pref changes.

Chrome (managed policy)Copy Anchor Link

programs.chromium only writes policy JSON (/etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/extra.json, read by every Chrome channel, dev included) and installs no browser. SpellcheckLanguage LOCKS the list, so a click in Settings cannot drop a language. Check: chrome://policy.

Electron apps are Chromium inside, but they do NOT read this policy.

Electron apps with no language setting (ChatGPT)Copy Anchor Link

Electron ignores the Chrome policy, but it reads spellcheck.dictionaries from its Preferences at start and downloads the missing .bdic from Google's CDN by itself. spellcheck-seed writes the SSOT list there on every switch, for each file in my.spellcheck.electronProfiles.

It SKIPS a running app, which would overwrite the file on exit. "Running" is the pid behind Chromium's SingletonLock and not the lock itself: ChatGPT leaves the lock behind even after a clean SIGTERM (measured). Once an app has the list it keeps it, so a skip only delays the seed to the next switch, or to spellcheck-seed by hand after closing the app.

Measured 03/11/2026, seeding by hand with the apps closed:

Discord and Obsidian keep their own list, so they stay out of the seed: pick the languages in Discord's text box context menu and in Obsidian's settings.

VS CodeCopy Anchor Link

VS Code has no spellchecker of its own: it is the Code Spell Checker extension, and pt-BR is a second extension with the dictionary. Extensions come from Settings Sync, not from Nix, so only cSpell.language is versioned. Install once (Sync carries them to the other machines): streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker and streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker-portuguese-brazilian.

Left by handCopy Anchor Link