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This 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.).

I 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.

That's not a problem with the squiggles as a user interface, but with the software assuming that you speak only one language.

I 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.

At least in Firefox I can select multiple dictionaries. Firefox will ignore words that are a match in any of those languages, at the cost ofc, of typos that are in one language but not another so sometimes I'll right click and uncheck a language temporarily.

While your point is valid, I think you are missing the point of the article.

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.

On most systems I use I've managed to set it up so that I get spell checking in all languages I use. So I only get a red line if it's not a valid word in any of the languages, which is pretty useful.

Yes, I have the same problem. Some programs handle this better than others. The Affinity suite is esp. bad.

Oh yeah - typical American thinking behind it. Everybody knows English and only uses one language.

To make the chronology clear:

• 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.

FWIW, the citation to Raymond Chen's blog is specifically in relation to the claim that it was reverse engineered from the MS-DOS port due to the source code being unavailable.

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...

Chen doesn't use Wikipedia as evidence that Krueger ported the game. He's pointing out that this is what Wikipedia mentions as most notable, and then adds another thing notable about Krueger, the squigglies. If you read the Chen's whole article, he adds more details about the port at the bottom, so he's clearly aware of it. It's fine to use the article as evidence for the port.

These kinds of circular evidence chains do sometimes happen on Wikipedia, but I don't think this is one of them.

Wait, that's illegal.

Are 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?!).

PC-Write on DOS had it as well.

It went all of those ways, you're just finding yourself in the universe where it went squiggles.

> 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

> I would just find or write an emulator

Nowadays, yes. Back then, systems could barely run the OS they came with...

> 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.

your wish will be granted when you die

Blue 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.

I 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.

Just 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?

Do you feel the same way about real-time syntax highlighting?

What'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.

MS Word has a "check spelling as you type" option which can be turned off - same with grammar.

> with AI I imagine ...

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.)

You can do this in vim with a simple mapping: nmap <C-x> mm[s1z=`m

Most 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.

If 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.

I 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.

"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."

Would it also be corpo brain to say ”He was the guy that landed on the moon”? That was Neil’s job, after all.

Word 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...

This gonna blow your mind: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Skeuomorphism

In the next Micro$lop blogpost they'll claim they invented words.