In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words (opens in new tab)

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 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.

I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Why can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.

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".

> 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 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.

I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Such a ubiquitous feature. Rest in peace Tony <3

The first time I saw the red squiggles is one of the few times I thought "Good job, Microsoft".

> 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”.

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

Great way to honor Tony and his work

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.

Teachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.

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.