One of the worst things of using a computer is having to work with tools that you don’t like. Sometimes it’s just because you don’t think the same way that the original devs did, or because the devs are stubbornly holding to a feature that’s widely-acknowledged to be broken.

The most freeing part of software development is the ability to make your own tools. That’s not to say that you’ll never be dependent on other people’s work, of course, but, if you don’t like the tool that you’re using, you have the freedom to make a new one if you’re willing to spend the time to do it. A good example of this would be NeoVim.

Case in point, the image above. The autocorrect in Google has been driving me absolutely insane for years. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a long time because the autocorrect is less aggressive, but it’s still pretty bad.

Then I noticed that the only thing that Google does in the get query (though I don’t know if it’s really a “get” query, since it starts with a ‘#’ instead of a ‘?’) to disable autocorrect is a simple flag: “nfpr=1”. That’s it. Adding that programatically is a very simple task.

So, I set out to create that very simple webpage. Apart from the Rage comic that I added for kicks, it’s just a single HTML file. I didn’t even separate the CSS and JS files. It was really that easy to do, but I wouldn’t have known that if I didn’t already know how to use JS. When I set Firefox to use this as my default search, it uses Google without autocorrect.

And that webpage is public. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that, I may as well share it, because I know I’m not the only one aggravated by this. The second reason is that I can now use it anywhere. From my phone to my office (if I can convince IT to let me through to it).

I relish the freedom that I have as someone with knowledge of software development, and I hope to learn more on a wide area of topics so that I can continue to create and tweak tools to my own purposes.