How do you change which language the built in Spell Checker uses in Visual Studio 2022?

Question

I've recently updated my Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 to version Version 17.5.2 and now get loads of spelling errors.

Is there a way to change the spell checker to use British English?

The flood of warnings for "Spelling error - Colour is not a word" is not helpful at all.

My windows language and region settings are set to English (United Kingdom).

Answer 1

Windows needs to have the correct language pack installed.

Use powershell or the settings ui of windows to get things set up and restart visual studio.

Setup using "Powershell"

PS C:\> Install-Language en-gb

Setup using "Windows setting UI"

Settings > Time & Language > Language > Add a language > "English (United Kingdom)" > Next > Install

Picky .editorconfig parser

I found out that the .editorconfig parser is quite picky, try to start with a minimal version like that:

[*]
spelling_languages = en-US,en-GB
spelling_exclusion_path = .\exclusion.dic

Answer 2

You can configure the spell checker through an .editorconfig file, as stated in the blog post about the spell checker here:

spelling_languages = _language_[,_language_]
(Example: = en-us,fr-fr)

I believe in your case, you want it to be:

spelling_languages = en-gb

The documentation also states the proper language pack must be installed, or it won't work (sounds like you already have that taken care of):

Note that the fr-fr language pack must be installed on the user’s machine or Visual Studio will incorrectly flag any French words as spelling errors.