I’m trying to turn off the word suggestions that appear below the line as I’m typing, because they distract me as I’m writing. I’ve tried Preferences > Corrections > Uncheck “Suggest completions as you type”, but that doesn’t seem to do anything. I’ve unchecked everything below “Suggest completions as you type”, and then unchecked “Suggest completions” too, and then rebooted Scrivener, and that didn’t help either. I looked in the Project Settings area and the Auto-Complete list is completely blank. Any ideas how I can disable this feature? Thank you!
System settings…?
Turn off Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing.
Thank you! That seems to have worked. It stinks that I guess Scrivener won’t autocorrect spelling errors now, nor notice them, but it’s good that the annoying word suggestion popups are gone. What a choice, there. No popup words = no spell check! 
Thank you so much for letting me know how to fix those popup word suggestions. I appreciate the help!
Your Auto-Completion preferences aren’t acting normally. You should be able to use Check Spelling without seeing the suggestions. I’d try resetting Scrivener preferences as described in this L&L Knowledge Base article:
scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb … references
As the article notes, make sure at the start to save your current preferences through the Manage dropdown (and backup, of course).
We’re not talking about auto completion here. We’re talking about macOS’s ordinary spell check while typing, which you can see in Textedit, et al. With respect, @starsky confused the little Mac pop-up (which has an “x”-shaped close button at the left and only ever provides one option) with Scrivener 's auto completion (which, unless you’re doing a screenplay, is off by default and requires the user to provide a list of items to be completed.)
There are two types of prompt that can come up while you type. Scrivener’s is referred to as “completion”, which is tied into the Project Settings pane, under Auto-Completion. By default these will never appear unless you specifically call upon them, with the Edit ▸ Completions ▸ Complete menu command, or if you use Scriptwriting mode. The appearance of this function is like a menu that pops down from the word, in vertical format, where you can arrow between options and press Return to select one.
The other type of prompt comes from macOS, and that looks more like an iOS type thing, with a little blue bubble that appears and generally only provides one option to choose from. That I believe can be disabled system-wide in the System Preferences: Keyboard: Text pane, with Correct spelling automatically.
I managed to get confused by the original post. I should’ve asked. If it is just a matter of check spelling, Starsky and any onlookers, ignore my earlier post about resetting preferences.
I’m sorry for any confusion I might have introduced.
No problem, scshrugged! My response came across as a bit curmudgeonly, for which I apologize.
Reviving this thread, since the feature is not a help, but a nuisance and a source for actual errors:
It messes up my fast-editing work of text by scrolling through it with the keyboard arrows (the cursor gets “stuck” in MacOS’s auto-correction-suggestion x-box and even causes actual errors by replacing correct terms with wrong ones).
Is there a way to kep MacOS’ autocorrect feature but disable the Suggestion feature (with the “x” in the white little bubble) for Scrivener, or for MacOS in general?
Reviving this tread again because it’s a pretty major issue. These errors, by design, won’t be picked up by spellcheckers and often won’t appear wrong to proofreaders. Not to mention the issues in workflow caused by it. This was never a problem with my old MacBook (which couldn’t go past OS 10.15), and it seems absolutely insane that a brand new M4 should be worse for writing than a 11-year-old Intel.
The only solution I’ve found anywhere is to completely turn off all spellchecking, which is kind of like burning down your yard to get rid of a weed that you’ve already plucked out the roots of. Has anyone found a solution for this, terminal or otherwise? Is there any plan by LaL to provide a fix on Scrivener’s end?
The specific setting you want is to disable “inline predictive text,” which you’ll find in the Apple → System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input pane.
This is not the same as the spelling autocorrection, and you should be able to enable one without the other.
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I appreciate the response. The issue that I and others are seeming to having is that turning those settings off at the system level still won’t turn them off in scrivener when spellcheck is active. I agree they should be separate—I use spellcheck but I don’t want predictive text—but as of now, when Scrivener spellcheck is on, the MacOS inline predictions are showing up regardless of the system setting.
Apparently, this has to do with Scrivener using some particular backend framework in MacOS, which I don’t recall the name of because there’s a few that relate to text. That’s why I was hoping that maybe there was a “permanently disable all predictive text forever” terminal command that someone has found to work.
Which version of Mac OS do you have? I’m not seeing this behavior in Sequoia.
I’m using Sequoia. 15.7.5. Scrivener version 3.5.2. Brand new computer, brand new install of Scrivener. I’ve turned all of the settings in both system and scrivener off and on, restarted, etc. The only solution has been to turn off spellcheck entirely, but I’m also not a programmer.
It might help to clarify exactly which macOS behaviour you are referring to. Is it the bubble text suggestion that appears below the word you are typing, or the faint text that gets added after the cursor which tries to predict what you are typing?
As far as I know, the system setting to disable auto-correction is the right one disable for bubbles, and inline prediction disables the grey text.
I’ll admit I’m not 100% on these because I switch all of that stuff off immediately, and I find sometimes it is very difficult to get them to turn back on for some reason. I’ve never seen inline predictive text work in this partition I’m testing on, for example. I have seen bubble suggestions on intentional misspellings, but only when I have auto-correction enabled.
I could imagine the bubble thing requiring spell check while typing enabled, since that is an augmentation of spell checking. But you should be able to switch the bubbles off without losing the red underlining effect in general. Again, I have all that stuff turned off, never see it, and often toggle spell check on with no adverse reactions.
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I was going to essentially write the above, but as it’s already been done, I’ll just add a screenshot of the different text features that might help demonstrate as well:
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The following reliably produces the bubbles in Scrivener (and other apps).
Add misspelled word:
Spellcheck kicks in by adding a space character after the word:
The bubble appears after using the left cursor key. (Backspace does not produce the bubble, because, I presume, you could be correcting the word yourself.)
Note: If your word is wildly incorrect, say eeqwe, the bubbles don’t appear, because, I presume, the spellchecker has no likely suggestion.
macOS 15.7.7
Scrivener 3.5.2
Settings:
When spellcheck is off, there are no bubbles.
Do either of you have it set to automatically show spelling corrections in Scrivener’s settings, by chance? I think that would certainly work this way as it is basically overriding the system setting. I don’t think anything in the actual Spelling and Grammar submenu is going to be of consequence here, just the settings that enable or disable this feature itself.
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