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".

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). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.

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.

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 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.

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.

Well... I guess squiggly lines are more useful now than ever with agents shipping tons of code every day

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.

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.