It’s like no one ever took a humanities class
The thing is, no-one else did. It's very easy to point to something being simple and obvious decades after it has become omnipresent.
Plus, someone has to be first. And he was first.
The core part of this is not the underline, or possibly even doing it asynchronously though on desktop software at the time that was more rare, but the squiggly underline. I strongly doubt squiggles are a choice anyone else may have made. A solid underline, school-teacher-style, maybe.
What in this context is "we"? I can name plenty of programs that accept textual input yet don't even spellcheck at all. The green squiggles are hardly ever even seen outside of word processors, for which it is practically mandatory to implement a 1:1 copy of the latest MS Word UI.
Evidently my browser uses red squiggles for what it believes to be spelling mistake because it just highlighted "UI" in my previous paragraph. That there is a chronic pandemic of terrible spelling in just about every online form of communication proves that the red squiggles are not effective at grabbing anybody's attention.
>If there are no better ideas
Counterpoint: 4% of the population cannot distinguish between red and green so at the very least I can say with confidence that using colors (especially those two colors in combination) is not a sufficiently effective way to distinguish between poor spelling and poor grammar. If it were up to me I'd replace one or both of them with some simple geometric shape such as an ellipse or a rectangle that encloses the word or phrase which is incorrect. The shape could still be colored to make it stand out to people who can distinguish between colors as long as the shape for grammar and the shape for spelling can be distinguished from one another without knowing what color they are.
Another good alternative is blinking like that old HTML tag. I don't know if there are any common disabilities which prevent people from easily discerning motion on a computer monitor (other than disabilities that inevitably apply to anything on the monitor, such as severe myopia or blindness) but blinking cursors are apparently acceptable so probably not.
Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.
Meine Deutsch ist so schlecht, MS Word hat gar nichts Ahnung wie das auseinanderfutzeln kann.
s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
s|nichts|keine| # wrong wordclass
s|wie das|wie es das| # missing subject in subclause
Annoyingly when I get stuck in German I lapse into Gaelic rather than English, which is generally even less helpful.
Also I hear and see "gar nichts" used as part of a sentence but not "gar keine" especially if you're saying "I have no idea about that", can you point to something that explains that for me?
s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
s|nichts|keine|
s|wie das|wie es das|
s|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch
s|nichts|keine|
s|wie das|wie es|
The point was that someone the author was fond of passed away. The author who likely might be reading these comments. And Krueger did some cool stuff that everyone use without realizing who did it.
• The Wikipedia page from before the reference to Chen's article was added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng... — it cites two sources for "coded by Tony Krueger" ("About box from the game") and for "written [by Krueger] in a single summer" (a forum post).
• Chen's article mentions "Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported…", then adds a footnote: “Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.”
• The Wikipedia article then cites Chen's article for this additional information.
It's all fine and proper. I've just edited the citation to make this clear again.
Prior to the edit there was a citation to the game itself for both Tony and Ed Halley as the game's development but the guy who added in the reverse engineering anecdote from chen's blog split the sentence so that the citation for the names of the game's developers is only applied to the other guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng...
These kinds of circular evidence chains do sometimes happen on Wikipedia, but I don't think this is one of them.
Can't believe we got to see one in the wild, and with clear attribution to boot.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#On_Wikipedi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
- previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535407
The process of creating things is completely within your control but the process of becoming known for a thing is completely beyond your control.
This is real.
I wish this was a clearly exposed feature, not a hidden one. But at least it's there. (Disclosure: this includes my name, something I am proud of.)
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...
It does have a real time spell checker. But it doesn't seem to have the squiggly line. The screen blinks at you when you type a word it can't find.
I've just run Prowrite 2 and 3.1.1 via FS-UAE.
So my memory is wrong about that feature have a red squiggly line.
It did have realtime checking. Also Prowrite was WYSIWYG. The realtime checking is neat, but it's actually a bit annoying with the blink. The red squiggly line is a better way to show that there is an unrecognised word.
Thanks for getting me to check.
I'm going to run it and have a look in a bit and get back to you.
It looks like 1st Word on the Atari ST also have a continuous spell checker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Word
From the link for 1st Word :
"Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.[12] The spell checker included the relatively rare, for the time, option to check on-the-fly. It also added document statistics display, including the number of characters, pages, etc"
Honestly I'd guess it's one of those things that possibly originated at Xerox Parc and then got added to consumer products from the 1980s onwards.
Personally, I remember it because I remember seeing Word 6 and thinking 'at last they have caught up to Prowrite'.
With the exception of the somewhat wobbly cheap keyboard, that was the best and most distraction-free setup I have ever seen for WYSIWYG word processing (sadly never tried the Xerox workstations).
1st Word Plus (1987) was a huge improvement and used professionally in magazine publishing.
MS Word was always bloated and poorly-designed in comparison.
In terms of getting useful work done with a minimum of effort, all of the 80s WPs, both command-line and WYSIWYG, were superior to Word.
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).
Thanks to huge protracted union fights. You’ll find the credits in an old US-produced movie—say, Gone with the Wind—are much more sparse than in one from the last decade or two. Incidentally, those fights happened too early to include CGI artists, and those often do go uncredited (undercredited?) even today.
Not that the Hollywood unions are a definite positive in all respects, or that the whole idea of fighting an oligopsony by establishing a monopoly in the shape of a cooperative doesn’t ring warning bells in my mind. But the movie industry absolutely would not credit most people if it could get away with it, and I wouldn’t expect the software industry to be any different (barring rare early pre-financialization examples[1]).
Nowadays, yes. Back then, systems could barely run the OS they came with...
It was also pretty common to use more capable machines to get some headroom for development tools, either by compiling for one (DOOM on NeXT) or by cross-debugging the system under test from it (a still-in-progress Lisa when developing the Macintosh; a DEC minicomputer, IIUC, when developing MS-DOS). You still do the former when you run an x86-64 image in your Android emulator; you probably still do the latter if you are targeting a microcontroller.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
[2] https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidanc...
It can point out things like unreachable code, redundant if predicates, suspicious casts and countless other things through realtime semantic analysis of code.
Of course there are infinitely more kinds of logic errors that simple static analysis like this can’t pick up, but an LLM “analysis” might.
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.
When was it that you added it to KMail?
Word '95 introduced the famous red squiggly underlines in 1995.
I believe KMail introduced spell-checking in 2004.
And I'm not even a native speaker, so I would certainly benefit, but like you I hate when it complains (or autocorrects!) intentional strings.
Obviously :-)
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.
So there are two modes... and have been for as long as I can remember (maybe since automatic spell check was there) and it is just a button press.
Now knowing that it's there... well... how many people review feature documentation these days, especially for something that is "feature rich", like Word?
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.
I think that might be just imagination - android autocorrect in particular got sufficiently worse that I finally turned it off (I still use it as a "typing assist" - it only displays choices that I can tap to replace, or (more often) ignore.)
RIP Tony Kreuger.
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.
That’s some heavy duty corpo-brain to be introducing your friend with ”He was on the team that did X”.
This feature is from a different time, though. The people working at big tech these days clearly don't care as much about the output of the stuff they work on.
"Tony pioneered the famous red-and-green squiggles of Microsoft Word, empowering millions of users with a spell-checking revolution."
As someone who uses the US layout but switches it to German to get ä, ü, ö, it's a schizophrenic experience...
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.