7 ms·
In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
- NoSalt 4mo agoI love Raymond Chen's stuff; particularly the way he brings humanity to our everyday tech.
- anitil 4mo agoThis 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
- mayoff 4mo agoAt my office we refer to these (in IntelliJ) as ketchup, mustard, and relish (depending on the color).
- ninju 4mo agoAs long as you don't put ketchup on your hot dog (in Chicago)
- jojobas 4mo agoTeachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.
- utopiah 4mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 4mo agoPlease don't sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- utopiah 4mo agoHmmm guidelines do exist and I don't think toxicity is a good thing so thanks for pointing that out. Still here I'm not attacking an individual but a large corporation that's been punished multiple time for terrible behavior and now with a founder and former CEO entangled in terrible affairs so I admit I'm not sure how wrong a bit of sarcasm truly is. I do genuinely believe Microsoft is a terrible company which entire business model is going against open source, locking IP down and thus truly claiming that they did "invent" more than they did. Is it more justified with this background than random sneering?
- tomhow 4mo agoIt’s not really about who the target is, it’s about the kind of conversations we want to have here. The guidelines ask us to converse curiously, avoid fulmination, and to avoid internet tropes. When we depart from that to vent at a megacorp, it has no effect on the corporation but does have the effect of making this place more miserable. There are plenty of opportunities to critique the megacorps when the topic is something they’ve actually done wrong, and we have many discussions about those cases.
- utopiah 4mo agoMy phrasing might be off putting and even against guidelines but, even through jest, the idea itself still remains : Microsoft does have a history of claiming a lot more than they did. It's a brilliant, albeit illegal, series of business decisions but it has not invented as much as it claims it had.
- tomhow 4mo agoCan you please just follow the guidelines? You can make any point if it’s on-topic and expressed according to the site’s intended spirit. We can’t keep debating whether the guidelines apply to a specific topic. You can’t run a forum that way.
- 4mo ago
- JsonDemWitOster 4mo agoThis gonna blow your mind: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Skeuomorphism https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Skeuomorphism
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- O-K 4mo agoF7 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.
- yzydserd 4mo agoI wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.
- jatora 4mo agoyour wish will be granted when you die
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoHe will be remembered as the person who used a monkey paw to make people praise others before they die.
- tom_ 4mo agoAmusingly, 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...!
- 1f60c 4mo agoWait, that's illegal.
- dhosek 4mo agoThere’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.
- Feathercrown 4mo agoCitogenesis! https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ Can't believe we got to see one in the wild, and with clear attribution to boot.
- anothermoron 4mo ago[dead]
- andrybak 4mo agoin addition to a relevant xkcd, there is also a Wikipedia article about the phenomenon and a behind-the-scenes list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#On_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#On_Wikipedi... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... - previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535407
- thunderbong 4mo agoMobile version https://m.xkcd.com/978/ https://m.xkcd.com/978/
- 4mo ago
- apparent 4mo agoI 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.
- TonyStr 4mo agoYou can do this in vim with a simple mapping: nmap <C-x> mm[s1z=`m
- joeframbach 4mo agoMost mobile keyboards will do autocorrect as you describe it, and show top-N alternatives when you go back and tap on the autocorrected word. I prefer this to it mocking my mistakes and making me pay penance by manually accepting the correction.
- apparent 4mo agoYeah I'm thinking about my desktop computer. Also, I find that the autocorrect on my phone is not that good, especially when the first letter is incorrect.
- Marsymars 4mo agomacOS at least will autocorrect stuff by default... I typically turn it off within a few days of a fresh install after getting annoyed by some correction I didn't want.
- apparent 4mo agoYeah that's what I do also. If it got smart enough I guess I'd leave it on, but I have not experienced anything remotely close enough to consider it. Also, it changes stuff without me realizing, and sometimes makes things worse.
- analog31 4mo agoI want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.
- jonathanlydall 4mo agoBlue rather than yellow colored squiggles, but ReSharper (and I expect JetBrains IDEs in general) kind of does this. 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.
- mike_hearn 4mo agoI actually implemented that! I have a private IntelliJ plugin that feeds markdown documents through an LLM and then highlights internal contradictions with the usual yellow background used for warnings. I use it when writing specs.
- kumarvvr 4mo agoI 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.
- trick-or-treat 4mo agoIt went all of those ways, you're just finding yourself in the universe where it went squiggles.
- _whoDis 4mo agoWhen 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.
- thombat 4mo agoI used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles) Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoI didn't know you could do that, although one of the languages I write in (Gaelic) is not really supported at least in Office 365 at all. Meine Deutsch ist so schlecht, MS Word hat gar nichts Ahnung wie das auseinanderfutzeln kann.
- 1718627440 4mo agos|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch s|nichts|keine| s|wie das|wie es| Just fyi.
- 1718627440 4mo agos|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch s|nichts|keine| s|wie das|wie es das| Just fyi.
- 1718627440 4mo agos|Meine|Mein| # Gender mismatch s|nichts|keine| # wrong wordclass s|wie das|wie es das| # missing subject in subclause Just fyi.
- denkmoon 4mo agoAnother 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.
- netsharc 4mo agoWord now switches the document language when you switch keyboard layouts... and then when you focus on a word you typed that it's memorized to be in that language, it switches the keyboard back to that layout. As someone who uses the US layout but switches it to German to get ä, ü, ö, it's a schizophrenic experience...
- monkamonme 4mo agoWhat 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.
- alex_suzuki 4mo agoWhy can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.
- kilpikaarna 4mo ago> 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”.
- nikanj 4mo agoWould it also be corpo brain to say ”He was the guy that landed on the moon”? That was Neil’s job, after all.
- Dibby053 4mo agoI think everybody likes to be part of something big. I would definitely be proud of having worked on something so well-known. 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.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoIf you know somebody from work, and that person built something most people on earth have seen and can identify, that seems a fine way of introducing that person.
- praash 4mo ago"Heavy-duty" calls for exaggerated impact and prestige. "Tony pioneered the famous red-and-green squiggles of Microsoft Word, empowering millions of users with a spell-checking revolution."
- N_Lens 4mo agoSuch a ubiquitous feature. Rest in peace Tony <3
- jdw64 4mo agoI 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
- maxignol 4mo agoGreat way to honor Tony and his work
- sien 4mo agoProwrite 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_REVIEWS_PROWRITE_3.1.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue123/P215_1_REVIE...
- rob74 4mo agoAre you sure about that? The page you link says that "The 100,000-word spelling checker lets you check a range of text, look up a single word, check continuously, and add words to the user dictionary", but doesn't mention underlining words. I also couldn't find a screenshot of that feature. Actually, with the AmigaOS 1.x color scheme, the squiggly lines would have probably been orange, because the standard color scheme was black/white/blue/orange (in AmigaOS 2 and above it was black/white/grey/blue to enable a 3D effect on the controls, so the highlight color would have had to be blue?!).
- sien 4mo agoThe 'check continuously' is the thing. 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 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'.
- jll29 4mo ago1st Word on the Atari ST 520+ with monochrome monitor: that was how the far future felt like in 1986. 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).
- kopirgan 4mo agoIIRC 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.
- TomasBM 4mo agoI'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".
- orthoxerox 4mo agoI 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.
- sbuttgereit 4mo agoJust as a casual test... I opened up Microsoft Word (online version). There's a button on the Review ribbon labelled "Spelling & Grammar", click that and the realtime, inline suggestions and squiggles are off no matter how many errors are present... click that button again and they're there. 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?
- zahlman 4mo agoDo you feel the same way about real-time syntax highlighting?
- orthoxerox 4mo agoNo, but writing VBA in Office was even worse than the squiggles, because it would show a modal error message if the line you'd just written contained a syntax error.
- INTPenis 4mo agoThose are the versions of Word that even the Stallman himself has praised on his website. RIP Tony Kreuger.
- frereubu 4mo agoI 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.
- yreg 4mo agoWhat's stopping you? I have spekl check disabled on all my devices. 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.
- zabzonk 4mo agoMS Word has a "check spelling as you type" option which can be turned off - same with grammar.
- neotiles 4mo agoWhat 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.
- jll29 4mo ago> 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).
- toyg 4mo ago> I would just find or write an emulator Nowadays, yes. Back then, systems could barely run the OS they came with...
- mananaysiempre 4mo agoProbably not well enough for a game, no. But the Apple II[1] and even the Apollo Guidance Computer[2] used interpreted bytecode to make their programs more compact. (The AGC actually had near-seamless interworking between native code and bytecode!) Also Pascal P-code, Microsoft BASIC’s pretokenized source, almost every Forth implementation ever, etc. The performance cost was pretty significant as you’d expect, but the result was still fast enough for the task. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16 [2] https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidance_computer_talk https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidanc...
- mananaysiempre 4mo ago> In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the end, and I enjoy reading them in detail. 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]). [1] https://www.folklore.org/Signing_Party.html https://www.folklore.org/Signing_Party.html
- Lendal 4mo agoIf 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.
- coldpie 4mo agoI have often felt that software should have a "Credits screen", like movies and video games do. For developers, QA staff, support staff, etc. I opened a bug to create one for our end-user facing software at my last job, but we never actually did it.
- nonfamous 4mo agoExcel 97 had an easier egg where if you entered a certain formula into a certain cell, a flight simulator would be invoked. In the flight simulator, you could fly to see an obelisk that listed the developer credits. This is real.
- vintagedave 4mo agoDelphi has that. Help > About, hold down Alt, and type T E A M. 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.)
- QuesnayJr 4mo agoThe first time I saw the red squiggles is one of the few times I thought "Good job, Microsoft".
- gbolcer 4mo agoAll this time I thought they were little tiny X's until I just now looked really closely.
- wheels 4mo agoI'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.
- andsoitis 4mo ago> 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). 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.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoReread the claim, the idea to add them to generic text widgets. I think it was around the mid 2000s when Firefox also started adding spellcheck, which is around the time I started learning how to spell things correctly.
- wheels 4mo agoAs I said, it was about the generic widgets. Your memory on the time though was better than mine. I looked up the commit and it was April 9th, 2003.
- Mountain_Skies 4mo agoUsed 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.
- othmanosx 4mo agoWell... I guess squiggly lines are more useful now than ever with agents shipping tons of code every day
- joshuat 4mo agoI 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
- applfanboysbgon 4mo agoThis isn't necessarily true. The fact that we're still using squiggles decades later means that nobody else has come up with a better idea. If there are no better ideas, if this is the best UI design for spellchecking there is, then it's simple enough that, if not for him, someone else would've came up with it. How many ways are there to highlight a word in a sentence, really, especially when your constraint is that the UI for highlighting the word must not overlap with actual ways normal people highlight words in sentences because the application supports that for non-spellchecking features (highlighted background, color change, non-squiggly underline, etc.).
- vintagedave 4mo ago> it's simple enough that, if not for him, someone else would've came up with it 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.
- snickerbockers 4mo ago>we're still using squiggles decades later 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.
- bshivarthy 4mo agoreminds 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura