The Intrusive Ghost Text
Windows 11 includes a feature designed to speed up typing, originally popularized on smartphones: predictive text suggestions. As you type a sentence in a supported application (like Mail, Edge, or WordPad), Windows will analyze your keystrokes and automatically display a “ghost” word ahead of your cursor, suggesting how to finish your thought. You can press the Right Arrow key to accept the suggestion. While helpful on a tiny touchscreen keyboard, on a full physical keyboard, this constant flickering of suggested text is highly distracting. It can interrupt your train of thought, and accidentally pressing the arrow key can insert incorrect grammar into your professional documents.
Disabling Typing Suggestions
To ensure a clean, distraction-free typing environment and stop Windows 11 from automatically suggesting text ahead of your cursor, you must disable the predictive typing feature in the system settings.
Press the Windows key + I to open the Settings app. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Time & language. In the main panel, click on Typing. This menu houses all the settings for both hardware and software keyboards. Look for the section specifically labelled Show text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard. Next to this option is a toggle switch. By default, it may be turned on. Click the toggle switch so that it turns grey (Off). You can also turn off the “Autocorrect misspelled words” toggle on this same page if you find that equally intrusive. Windows will instantly stop displaying ghost text as you type.