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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#31

Post by monkamonme »

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.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#32

Post by thombat »

_whoDis wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#33

Post by jonathanlydall »

analog31 wrote: post #14

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

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.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#35

Post by apparent »

eichin wrote: post #22
apparent wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.)

What I mean is that if I entered a sentence into ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok and tell it to fix the flagged word, it will be able to get it right almost all of the time (assuming it's not a weird proper noun or inside joke slang).

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#37

Post by kilpikaarna »

> 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”.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#39

Post by nikanj »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #37

> 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”.

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

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#40

Post by Dibby053 »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #37

> 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 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.

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