Remove Firefox Dictionaries

[speltriao1 (sdadas eqw)]

I’ve installed Fedora 32, and by default a lot of different English dictionaries came on Firefox. I’ve added my native language, which is Portuguese.

I would like to stay with only those two options: English (USA) and Portuguese(Brazil).

I tried going to the “Dictionary” on about:extensions page, but there was only listed Portuguese.

When I was using Ubuntu, it didn’t have all those options for English, I suppose it’s a Fedora thing. How to remove them?

[jonathans]

Hello speltriao1

This is something that’s changed in Fedora 32.

If you go to about:config and type ‘spellchecker’, you’ll see there is a config entry called

spellchecker.dictionary.path

and it points to the directory /usr/share/myspell, where all the spell-check dictionaries are stored:

ls -l /usr/share/myspell

Note that most of them are just links.

To get rid of all the many English entries on the pop-up menu, add /en_US to the end of the config entry so that it reads

/usr/share/myspell/en_US

That’ll hide all the dictionaries other than the US. Restart firefox after changing the config.

You’ll note that the ‘Dictionaries’ section in Add-ons Manager shows only dictionaries you’ve added yourself and not those in the myspell directory.

[jonathans]

The above trick won’t work if you want to use an English language other than en_US.

There are two ways round this:

1. Make a sub-directory in /usr/share/myspell and link the files of the desired language. For example (for en_GB):

cd /usr/share/myspell
mkdir en_GB
cd en_GB
ln -s ../en_GB.dic
ln -s ../en_GB.aff

(all the above commands must be run as root).

Then change the config entry to that sub-directory, so it reads:

spellchecker.dictionary.path          /usr/share/myspell/en_GB

2. Blank the spellchecker.dictionary.path config entry and add the desired dictionary by downloading it via the ‘Add Dictionaries’ on the pop-up menu - so that it appears in the Add-ons Manager under Dictionaries.

Both these methods leave the en_US dictionary on the list - if anyone can work out how to get rid of that, I’m interested!

[speltriao1 (sdadas eqw)]

This worked for my. Thanks!

[psychoslave (mathieu lovato stumpf guntz)]

Hello @speltriao1,

Here is what I do : sudo find /usr/share/myspell/ -type l -exec rm {} +. That removes all symbolic links in the myspell directory. Although I’m completely supportive of efforts toward localization, these at most give the false impression that user is provided with a more specific version of language support.