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About me and the blog

My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

For your consideration: Tab to fix spelling

A few years ago, I suggested adding a new interaction to Figma. If your text cursor was on a misspelled word (anywhere inside, or the edges), you could press Tab to quickly accept the suggested correction, without even seeing it:

Independently, Google Docs approached it from a slightly different angle, but landing on a similar interaction – in their version there’s a small visual callout, although you can still press Tab (and then Enter) to accept the suggestion:

I know the Tab key has a lot of jobs – from indenting bullet points to jumping through GUI elements – but in this context this new addition doesn’t seem to be in conflict.

(Should I write a long photoessay about the Tab key, similar to the ones I wrote for Return/​Enter and Fn keys?)

Since we added it, I’ve really loved how it feels. From various typeaheads and autocompletes elsewhere, Tab has a strong “forward movement” energy so it makes conceptual sense, and it’s just really fun to go around and quickly fix your writing this way.

I think a lot about how to make keyboard interactions feel superpower-y: a good keyboard shortcut on a large key, a tight interaction, a blink-of-an-eye velocity – something that’s eminently designed to lodge itself in your motor memory as quickly as possible, as it builds on top of prior motor memory. I’m biased, of course, but I like the “no scope” Figma version more, and it has that feeling to me.