How To Enable The Built-In Autocorrect In Windows 10

Enable Windows 10’s Built-In Autocorrect

Since the April 2018 Update, Windows 10 has featured its own autocorrect functionality, even for hardware keyboards. This is a simple toggle that you can use to catch basic mistakes and is a good first option to try.

To enable it, open Settings by using Win + I, then browse to Devices > Typing. In the list, scroll down to the Hardware keyboard section. Here, enable the Autocorrect misspelled words as I type slider.

After you do this, Windows will fix common typos as you enter text anywhere on the system. In our testing, this includes changing “teh” to “the” and “mispell” to “misspell”, for example.

Unlike your mobile phone keyboard, it won’t figure out what word you were trying to type based on the keys you hit; it only resolves specific typos to their correct word. It also doesn’t fix errors like having two letters in a row “CApitalized” or adding extra letters, such as “sooon”.

Use an Autocorrect Script With AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey is a powerful Windows scripting tool that you can use for all sorts of purposes. For instance, you can assign system commands to a keyboard shortcut, expand text to type large snippets with a few characters, reassign keyboard keys, and much more.

Download AutoHotkey and the AutoCorrect Script

To start, download AutoHotkey and install it on your system. Once that’s done, you’re ready to start using scripts with the software.

Thankfully, you don’t have to set up autocorrect yourself. This AutoCorrect script by Jim Biancolo has been around since 2006 but still works fine since typos don’t really change with time. On that page, press Ctrl + S to save it to your computer.

By default, Windows will prompt you to save this as a TXT file. However, you need to save it as an AHK file, which is what AutoHotkey uses for scripts.

In the Save As dialog, make sure to remove the .txt at the end of the File name so the file ends with .ahk. If you do it correctly, when you view the icon in File Explorer, it will show as a white page with an H on it. 

Viewing the AutoCorrect Script

Once you have the script running, it will start auto-correcting text everywhere you type on your computer. That’s all you need to take advantage of it, but you can view the script if you’re interested in what it does, or even tweak it to your liking for better results.

You can also right-click on the AutoHotkey icon in your system tray and choose Edit This Script, though this will open it in Notepad, which isn’t particularly user-friendly for making edits.

If you use another text editor, right-click the script file and choose Open With, or drag and drop it into your chosen text editor, to view and edit it there.

Editing the Script

Inside, you’ll see the script split up into a few sections.

By default, the script doesn’t fix “TWo CApitals”, but the code is there. Simply remove the comment lines (/* and */ at the beginning and end) in the “AUto-COrrect TWo COnsecutive CApitals” section to activate that code.

If you don’t like any of the primary autocorrect entries for some reason, simply add a semicolon (;) before the line to comment it out. For example, you might not want it to correct “wanna” to “want to”, which it does by default. It’s better to comment out than delete, in case you want to restore a line in the future.

At the bottom, you’ll find a section with the title Anything below this point was added to the script by the user via the Win+H hotkey. This is where you can add your own autocorrect entries. The format is simple, as you can just copy how other entries on the list look.

Use the following:

::typo::correction

For example, to correct “winodws” to “windows”, you would enter:

::winodws::windows

While you can add these manually, the AutoCorrect script makes it even more convenient. Simply highlight an error anywhere on your computer and press Win + H. When you do, a popup will appear allowing you to specify the error and correction using the above format. Click OK to add it to the section at the bottom.

Above this area, you’ll find the Ambiguous entries section. Here, the author gathered some fixes that are potentially useful but not always clear; thus they’re commented out.

For example, the typo “aparent” could correct to either “apparent” or “a parent”. If you have a preference, move the line to the user section at the bottom and put the correct entry on the right side.

So if you wanted “aparent” to correct to “apparent”, you would move the following line and delete the, a parent:

:aparent::apparent, a parent

Finally, be sure you save the file after making changes! If you don’t, they won’t take effect.