Let me be honest: I’m bad at spelling. Not hopeless, but enough to scatter mistakes through my emails. And at work, that’s embarrassing. Correctify was born from that little daily shame. Here’s its story.
The starting point: my typo-ridden emails
No matter how carefully I reread, mistakes slipped through: missed agreements, typos, clumsy phrasing. Classic checkers missed half of them, while modern AIs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) did a far cleaner job. So the problem wasn’t the correction itself… it was how to reach it.
Copy-pasting: such a waste of time
Like many people, I had a workaround: copy my text, open a ChatGPT or Gemini tab, paste, ask it to “fix this”, copy the result, paste it back into my email, then patch up the formatting. Effective? Yes. Painful? Terribly. Every message broke my flow for that little back-and-forth dance. Multiply that by a dozen emails a day and it’s a lot of wasted time, and annoyance.
One evening, I hacked something together just for me
I’m a developer. So one evening, fed up, I told myself: “enough”. Within a few hours I had a tiny tool for my own use: a “Fix the text” action right inside Thunderbird, on right-click, exactly where I write my emails. Select, right-click, fixed. No tab, no copy-paste. The gesture became invisible, exactly what I wanted.
“Might as well share it”
That little hack changed my daily life. And one day I thought: I’m probably not the only one who’s bad at spelling and tired of copy-pasting. So I cleaned up the code, added French and English, then extended the idea beyond Thunderbird: the Chrome and Firefox extensions, and even a Windows app that fixes text in any program. And here’s where we are today.
Why not an existing tool?
Fair question, there are excellent ones. But two things bothered me:
- The price: most good checkers are paid, by subscription.
- The slow gesture: you often have to open a panel, go through menus, click here then there. A few seconds each time… multiplied by all your messages.
Some are undeniably more complete than Correctify, with deep analysis and tons of options. But none were as simple as what I wanted: select, right-click, done. Nothing more.
The philosophy: simple, fast, free, private
So Correctify makes a clear choice:
- Simple before complete: one gesture, zero learning curve.
- Fast: the correction lands right where you write, in seconds.
- Free: you use your own API key, so no subscription.
- Private: no intermediate server, nothing stored.
What now?
Correctify is still a project I tinker with in my spare time, and keep improving based on my ideas… and yours. A bug to report, a suggestion? The contact page is there for that, I read everything. And if the tool saves you time, a little coffee is always appreciated. 😊
Deep down, Correctify is just the tool I wish I’d found the day I got fed up. I hope it helps you too.