51–60 of 127 posts
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.
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…
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.
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 gramm…
Meine Deutsch ist so schlecht, MS Word hat gar nichts Ahnung wie das auseinanderfutzeln kann.
RIP Tony Kreuger.
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...
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.
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...
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 sche…
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'.