My only gripe about the built in Spellcheck utility in Firefox 2.0 is that there is no interface for managing your custom dictionary words. FF will allow you to add a word to your personal dictionary, but there is no way to remove mistakenly added word from within Firefox interface.
You can manage your added dictionary words by directly editing the dictionary file persdict.dat located in your Firefox profile. How do you get there? Assuming you are using the default profile do this:
$ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default
On windows this file is most likely located in:
C:\ Ducuments and Settings\ [username] \ Application Data\ Mozilla\ Firefox\ Profiles\[profile]
Once you find your profile directory you can simply edit persdict.dat with an ordinary text editor. Simply take out all the words you don’t need, or add new ones, and save the file. You may need to restart Firefox for the changes to go into effect.
Now let’s hope that Firefox 2.1 has this functionality built into the interface so that we can avoid the hassle.
[tags]firefox 2.0, firefox, dictionary, spellcheck, persdict.dat[/tags]
sounds like that an extension for that would be great.
The file called “en-US.dic” is actually in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\dictionaries. Good tip though.
Milos – I think the en-US.dic is the standard US-english dictionary, while perdict.dat is the personal dictionary for your profile.
When you choose “add to dictionary” from the context menu, that word will be stored in perdict.dat which is located in your home directory and not to en-US.dic which sits somewhere in a system owned dir that you may not have access to.
You might be right, but I wasn’t able to find perdict.dat on my system. Isn’t that a bit odd?
On windows mine was in:
C:\ Documents and Settings\My Username\ Application Data\ Mozilla\Firefox \Profiles \default.bae\perdict.dat
On Linux it was in:
~/.mozilla/firefox/[somegoobelygook].default
I’m guessing OSX version will store it in the same place as Linux.
It is possible that the file is missing because you haven’t added any words to your dictionary yet. Try adding one and see if the file appears.
hahahah…it must have been a delay of some sort…I have earlier added “Milos” which is clearly not in an English dictionary, but the file wasn’t there. Well, it just showed up some 10 minutes later…got it! Thanks!
It’s probably caching it in memory or something.
OS X Stores the profiles in “~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/”
For example,
“~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[*****].default/persdict.dat”
Oh man, so much for familiar linux underpinnings eh? So there are no dot files in OSX?
Heh, this kinda looks like a windows path with all those upper case letters (gasp!) and spaces (double gasp!).
I kinda want to get one of those new dual core MacBooks and learn more about OSX, but I always figured that once you drop down to the shell, and look past the pretty desktop environment it would drive more or less like BSD.
So I’m guessing they did fuck with the file system structure no?
Anyways, thanks for the tip!
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Great tip, this came in handy!
Also, a quick way to get to “Application Data” folder on Windows is, in Start menu > Run, to type in “%appdata%”. I use it often to save time.
One note.
It will not create the persdict.dat file the first time until you close the firefox session you currently have open.
and this is a wonderfully helpful tip if you’re like me and sometimes have spastic mouse control moments.
:)
Thanks Mike! Maybe this was why Milos could not find it the first time around.
Amen on that!
Thanks mucho for the tipola. Apparently despite all the praises of the M$ haters, the Mozilla developers missed a gaping hole. You have to be able to maintain optional features. As a ‘used-to-be-developer/architect’ this has been buggin’ me for a while. I distinctly remember building these apparati in my prior life, even if the were not always the most elegant constructs.
I’m kinda neutral in this war, and can’t see why Bill & Co, could not have seen this (spell-checker) as a ‘should-have’.
Here’s an MDSN link about that
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=214792
Thanks again. I’ve been getting mighty sick of ‘soem’ & ‘soemthing’ passing muster – hahahaha.
\:-)
should a person on twitter be called a twitwit?
Now that MS started browser development again it’s probably only a matter of time before they include the dictionary feature.
Heh, it’s hardly a war anyway. They won the war, then stopped all active development of IE and allowed the competitors who remained on the market to surpass them. Now they are playing catch-up. And it’s a good thing. Any development and competition on the browser market is good.
I just hope that one day IE will actually support the W3C specs at least as well as Firefox does, and that firefox will be able to pass the Acid2 test like Opera does. :P
I’m a Firefox user myself, but I’m envious of Opera’s awesum W3C compliance.
[quote comment=”1825″]OS X Stores the profiles in “~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/”
For example,
“~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[*****].default/persdict.dat”[/quote]
Finally, someone who knows what they are talking about! I visited numerous support websites including apple and firefox support. None of them were right or were not detailed enough to be able to do this.
Thanks Jeremy, you rock!