The acronym DWIM stands for "Do What I Mean". It is a humorous way of describing a user's feeling that a computer function should work the way the user wants ? instead of the actual result that they told it to do, but did not want. The term has been in use for decades.

Recently, word processors have DWIM features that check for typos and spelling errors as words are typed.

Anticipating variations in the way a user or a programmer expresses themselves has a long history. Before 1984, Warren Teitelman wrote routines to "correct errors automatically or with minor user intervention". http://www.opost.com/dlm/tenex/hbook.html Following in the LISP tradition, Emacs has a function comment-dwim that comments out a selected region if uncommented, or uncomments it, when already commented out.

See also

• Principle of least astonishment

External links

• DWIM in the Jargon File

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