I'll be honest—I didn't think I needed a spell checker in VS Code until I pushed a commit with "recieved" in a variable name. My team noticed. I learned my lesson.
If you're coding in a browser-based VS Code environment—whether it's GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, or the vscode.dev web client—you've probably run into the same problem. Desktop extensions don't always work the same way in the cloud. And spell checkers? They're surprisingly tricky to get right when you're working with code, not prose.
So let's talk about what actually works when you need to catch typos in code without sacrificing privacy, performance, or your sanity.
Why Browser-Based VS Code Changes the Game
Here's the thing about web environments: they're sandboxed. That means extensions can't always access your local file system or run background processes the same way they would on desktop. Traditional spell checkers rely on dictionaries stored locally, but in the cloud, you're often stuck with whatever the extension author baked in.
