I wrote it using an excellent scripting language called "tcl".

Working on this thing became something of an obsession. Originally, I didn't undertake to implement a GUI (Graphic User Interface), although in version 1.06 I snuck in a little pushbutton interface to facilitate lookup monitoring, and since then have started GUIfying operations when doing so genuinely improves the usability. Perhaps this interest in GUIfying things will become a trend, until the whole darned thing has a graphical front end! Wouldn't that be something....

Nonetheless, most interaction is still via a command line interface. If that doesn't bother you, consider picking it up and using it!

Here's an Emacs screenshot showing some output, and a prompt:

...and here's an Emacs screenshot showing some results from a lookup:

Well, in the end—it seems to me, anyway—the real test of a puzzle is in the clues. Putz now has a pretty comprehensive built-in clue database (217K+) clues for 27K+ words on tap), but I still feel a need to come up with my own from time to time, and inventing clever ones is a bit of an art form.

That said, you're welcome to try out some of my puzzles, and comments are certainly welcome!

You can see my puzzles here.

How Do You Use It?

Following is the latest release.

Note: I haven't tested it on Unix-y systems, so I don't know about ease-of-installation, or perhaps knottier technical issues. I hope to look at those soon.

While I haven't tested it on anything besides Windoze™, bear in mind it uses tcl in a very vanilla way. It should run anywhere tcl can run.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Version 1.29 has a serious bug; don't use it.

And here are the latest release notes:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

VERSION 1.34 - Mon 01/18/2010 07:59:58.27

Putz now properly clears out command line disambiguation when the User
decides not to make use of it. This ensures that the subsequent
specification of a clue number doesn't get construed as an attempt to
follow through on an old left-over disambiguation.

Fixed a bug in the SEt command.

Added an additional note to the tkChooser's button bar; this reminds
the User of the effects of clicking on words. These effect differ from
situation to situation. After a lookup, one clicks on words you DON'T
want put in the trash. When using the '-n' option in the GLob command
to preen the word list, one clicks on the words that one WANTS to
trash. It seemed to me that this could confuse a hapless User (heck!
it even confused ***me*** sometimes!), and a friendly reminder would
be handy and relaxing.

Cleaned up some oversights in recursive lookup return code handling,
re lexical weights. While chasing down the problem, I also realized a
smarter way to handle return codes there: I was able to remove some
return code math processing, thus bumping up the lookup efficiency a
tiny bit.

I now also autoload the lex even if you have complete word fill, but
still have clues to define: This way, our servicable spellcheck
function is ready to go.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Anyway, have at it!:

• Download putz, version 1.34