Case and Accent Sensitivity

The spell checker supports case and accent sensitive checking. By default it is turned off for English, but is turned on for some language dictionaries where accents and case are more integral to the language.

Accent Checking

A single setting controls both case and accent checking. The main use case to turn off case and accent checking is for computer programming.

When caseSensitive is set to false, accents are still checked, but they are allowed to be missing for the entire word. Using the wrong accent or mixing accents is not considered correct.

Example with café:

word		Reason
café	✓	Matches the original word
cafe	✓	Accent is missing, ok when case sensitivity is off
cafë	❌	Using a different accent with e is not ok
cäfe	❌	Added accent to a is not ok

Default Setting

Because the spell checker was originally case insensitive, making it case aware takes care so as to not break things. CSpell 5.x introduced the caseSensitive setting to allow checking case.

Note: Not all dictionaries are currently case aware, so in those cases, lower case words are allowed.

Enable Case Sensitive Checking by Default

Note: this might create a lot of false issues in code files.

Global Enable: cspell.json

{
  "caseSensitive": true
}

Note: Some language dictionaries (like German, French, Spanish) turn on case sensitivity by default. Setting the global "caseSensitive": false is not sufficient to turn it off. It is necessary to to use languageSettings to turn off case sensitivity based upon the file type.

By File Type

It can be enabled per file type.

The following configuration will turn on case sensitivity for markdown files.

cspell.json

"languageSettings": [
  {
    "languageId": "markdown",
    "caseSensitive": true
  },
  {
    "languageId": "javascript",
    "caseSensitive": false
  }
]

By Glob Pattern

cspell.json

"overrides": [
  {
    // Case sensitive markdown in the docs folder
    "filename": "docs/**/*.md",
    "caseSensitive": true
  },
  {
    // Make sure TypeScript files are NOT case and accent Sensitive.
    "filename": "src/**/*.ts",
    "languageSettings": [
      {
        "languageId": "*",
        "caseSensitive": false
      }
    ]
  }
]