- I find it odd that many of both the blog comments and the HN thread comments are focused on debating the merits of the feature itself rather than the broader point of the article, that a small isolated change made by one person can have a massive, long-lasting impact on software and on how billions of people interact with it for decades after it was implemented.
It’s like no one ever took a humanities class
- When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.
- If you continue in this industry of software creation in a corporate setting, and you put your name into the source code, eventually you will become known for products/features that you never expected to become known for. And the things you had actually worked the hardest on and hoped to become known for will be lost and forgotten to time.
The process of creating things is completely within your control but the process of becoming known for a thing is completely beyond your control.
- Amusingly, Chen's article refers to the Wikipedia page as evidence that Tony Krueger did the port. The article's evidence for that in its latest version? A link back to Chen's article...!
- I love these articles. Like. Of the million possible ways this could go, squiggles were the one, and it was from decisions of one man, on a whim. Yet, they completely change the world.
- Prowrite on the Amiga had a real time spell checker before Word did.
Possibly there were other programs that did as well prior to that.
But Prowrite did it and had a red squiggly line under incorrect words.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue123/P215_1_REVIE...
by alex_suzuki
0 subcomment
- Why can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.
- > he accomplished this without the source code
Sure thing, who needs source code? This is HN.
But instead of reverse-engineering, I would just find or write an emulator, in case I would be asked to "port" another software.
It's actually sad that for the most part, we don't know who is responsible for the good and bad features of software we use.
In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the end, and I enjoy reading them in detail. Software development should have the same culture (some games do, and then some "Easter eggs" do).
- I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.
- I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.
- I'm not always a fan of the squiggles, but I can appreciate the UI pattern. It's definitely one of the more intuitive and recognizable visual markers for "something's wrong with this word".
- I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.
- F7 gang standup!
When did the squiggles disappear? I do miss the variety in text formatting. You used to be able to animate text in Word and have squiggly double underline in different colours. Everything now is sans serif, sans variety.
- I would really like to be able to entirely disable spell checking. I know it's a very niche desire, but I'm happy to live with my mistakes, and there are regularly bits of slang, technical terms, acronyms etc that I have to get it to "learn" which I'd rather not have to. I often wonder how people who write in non-standard English manage these days. Can't imagine James Joyce would have been a fan.
by orthoxerox
2 subcomments
- I think it was Larry Constantine that really hated them. As he put it, when you are writing, you should always be thinking about your next words, but the squiggles draw your attention to the words you have already written. They shout at you, "Hey, listen! Do you really think you can spell? What's this 'fatouos' thing you've just written?" and will keep bothering you until you stop and go back to click on the undersquiggled word to fix it. They are basically a primitive form of Clippy.
Word having two modes, like vi, would solve this. In the writing mode, it never bothers you with anything, just lets you write. As soon as you press the button to switch to the editing mode, it is free to bombard you with squiggles and AI suggestions.
- I wish there was a button on my keyboard that I could press when there's a red squiggle in the last N words, which would cause my computer to fix the underlined word to its best guess. It should wait until a few words later, to get more context. It should flash the new word as it's being inserted, so I can easily see what it's done.
Spell check used to be kind of lousy, but with AI I imagine it would have a very high rate of accuracy in context. I am greatly slowed down by having to delete a few words/chars every now and then, and if I could just smash a key and go on my way, it'd be much more efficient.
- Well... I guess squiggly lines are more useful now than ever with agents shipping tons of code every day
- Those are the versions of Word that even the Stallman himself has praised on his website.
RIP Tony Kreuger.
- What a lovely, eloquent piece to honour the memory of an esteemed and highly regarded colleague.
Everyone in the comments here focusing on their own personal complaints about squiggles and the colour of squiggles and how to disable spell checking is really missing the point.
- IIRC Scott McNealy once trolled Microsoft for this - hundred different ways to draw squiggles that can be configured. As an example of code bloat and useless features.
by bshivarthy
0 subcomment
- reminds me of the story of the Shuji Nakamura revolutionizing neon lights and getting a bonus of $180 for that work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura
- Such a ubiquitous feature. Rest in peace Tony <3
- I love Raymond Chen's stuff; particularly the way he brings humanity to our everyday tech.
- All this time I thought they were little tiny X's until I just now looked really closely.
by Mountain_Skies
0 subcomment
- Used to get slick ads for nightclubs and events from promoters with the red squiggles printed on them. Nice, full color, glossy, 4x6 card size ads that they'd stick on car windshields, hand out on the street, and stuff into any nook or cranny they could find. I was somewhat mystified as to what production process they used that allowed for the squiggles to remain and why what they were trying to indicate was ignored as most of the errors were indeed errors. Simply sending a document to a print device normally does not preserve the squiggles but somehow, they would end up in the adverts.
by kilpikaarna
4 subcomments
- > Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.”
That’s some heavy duty corpo-brain to be introducing your friend with ”He was on the team that did X”.
- This was a lovely tribute. As much as we like to complain about windows, there's clearly a lot of love and care that has been put in to it by people like Tony
- I really envy people who take pride in what they've created. I wish I could build something that becomes standardized like that too. How happy must Tony Krueger have been? Now that everyone uses the feature he built as a standard
Rest in Peace
- Another thing that has been completely broken by Microsoft over the years. Spell check in Word today is absolutely godawful, it generates more false positives than true positives by a massive margin. Shit like "the" having a red squiggle. Drives me insane as every time I see it I think about how far software has fallen.
- At my office we refer to these (in IntelliJ) as ketchup, mustard, and relish (depending on the color).
- Great way to honor Tony and his work
- The first time I saw the red squiggles is one of the few times I thought "Good job, Microsoft".
- Teachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.
by monkamonme
0 subcomment
- What strikes me about stories like this is how many invisible decisions shape the interfaces we can't imagine living without. The squiggle wasn't a product requirement or a committee decision — it was one person's intuition about how to surface information without interrupting flow.
The analog31 comment about "yellow squiggles for logic errors" is a genuinely interesting design problem. Linters do this in IDEs, but the reason it hasn't made it into general productivity software is that spell errors have a clear ground truth (the dictionary), while logic errors require understanding intent. The difficulty scales completely differently.
Hacker News