I love to have my sources ‘warning free’, so I spend an extra effort to have things clean and the way the compilers like it. In a similar way, I want to have my source comments spell-error free :-). For this, I love the Eclipse spell checker (see this post) which offers to add unknown words to the dictionary:

Add word to dictionary

But what if that ‘Add’ action is missing? How to re-enable it?

Missing User dictionary

If the spell checker cannot find a word, it offers to add it to the user dictionary. If not, then probably it is disabled by this dialog:

Missing User Dictionary

Because if I check “Do not show ‘Add word’ proposals if user dictionary is missing”, then it does not show up anymore ;-):

No Add Word shown

But what if I want it back? Unfortunately there is no such option to re-enable it?

I wrote some time ago the article “Show it again! (How to re-enable hidden Dialogs in Eclipse)“, so I used the method to export and compare the Eclipse preferences, and indeed, here is a setting which looks promising:

So I changed

/instance/org.eclipse.cdt.ui/do_not_ask_to_install_user_dictionary=true

to

/instance/org.eclipse.cdt.ui/do_not_ask_to_install_user_dictionary=false

And things were as before :-).

An even easier way would be if I would remember the text of that dialog box above. It says “… if user dictionary is missing”. So the another way is to give a user dictionary file name under Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Spelling:

User Defined Dictionary

Then the ‘add to dictionary’ shows up too.

Happy Spell-Checking 🙂