In the past two weeks, I worked on two things:

• Squashing a rebus bug.
• Combine the two suggested words lists into one.

The rebus bug

A rebus cell is a cell that contains more than one letter in it. These aren’t too common in crossword puzzles, but they do appear occasionally—and especially so in harder puzzles.

Our word suggestions lists were not working for slots with rebus cells. More specifically, if the cursor was on a cell that’s within letters in rebus - 1 cells to the right of a rebus cell, then an assertion would fail, and the word suggestions list would be empty.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to fix a strange bug that causes the word suggestions list to have the wrong order sometimes.

For example, suppose you have an empty 3x3 grid. Now suppose that you move your cursor to each of the cells of the 1-Across slot (labelled α, β, and γ).

+---+---+---+
| α | β | γ |
+---+---+---+
|   |   |   |
+---+---+---+
|   |   |   |
+---+---+---+

You should expect the word suggestions list for 1-Across to stay the same, regardless of which cell your cursor is on. After all, all three cells have the same information: that the 1-Across slot is empty, and the intersecting vertical slot of whatever cell we’re on (1-Down, 2-Down, or 3-Down) is also empty.

Today marks the end of the community bonding period, and the start of the coding period, of GSoC.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been looking into other crossword editors that are on the market, in order to see what features they have that we should implement.

I found the process enlightening. It was interesting to try so many different versions of the same product. The UIs differ quite dramatically, the same feature may be implemented differently in each editor, and some features only exist in a few or even a single editor.

I will be contributing to GNOME Crosswords, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2025 program. My project adds construction aids to the Crosswords editor. These aids provide hints, warnings, and data that help the user create better crossword puzzles.

I have three mentors:

• Jonathan Blandford
• Federico Mena Quintero
• Tanmay Patil

GNOME Crosswords

The GNOME Crosswords project consists of two applications:

• The Crosswords player, which lets you play crossword puzzles.
• The Crosswords editor, which lets you create crossword puzzles.

My project focuses on the Crosswords editor.