[HN Gopher] Language Tool - Open-source Grammarly alternative
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Language Tool - Open-source Grammarly alternative
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 264 points
Date : 2022-07-26 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (languagetool.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagetool.org)
| ushakov wrote:
| if you want something like LanguageTool but for your website,
| check out Typosaur, it's currently in Beta!
|
| https://typosaur.com
| account-5 wrote:
| No Android or Linux app. Subscription is high (like others have
| said). Appears no offline version (might be wrong) and the text
| is stored on their servers be default unless you manually delete
| it.
|
| I'll not be using it but good effort though.
| ruoranwang wrote:
| Is there an alternative that provides an offline version?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| > Appears no offline version
|
| Sorta, you can always run the server locally on your own
| machine. It's a bit wasteful, but not terribly so.
|
| > No Android or Linux app
|
| I mean you can just use the plugins for browsers, email, and
| document writing. It won't work in the terminal (would it on
| MacOS regardless?) but I wouldn't consider that a downside.
| I'll be waiting for the Emacs package myself, but I doubt I'll
| have to hold my breath.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| There's already Emacs package, but it works only with offline
| version.
|
| https://github.com/mhayashi1120/Emacs-langtool
|
| Now that I checked, looks like there's another package, but I
| didn't t try it.
|
| https://github.com/emacs-languagetool
| bartmoss wrote:
| No subscription is required for the base version no account,
| either. Of course, the base version doesn't have all the
| features as premium, but it is still excellent, in my opinion.
| I have used the free version for years. There is an offline
| version, as it is open source.
|
| The full text isn't stored on the servers, but you can always
| just deploy it yourself for maximum privacy:
|
| https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server
|
| Furthermore, there are options for docker:
| https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool#docker
| account-5 wrote:
| Does it work on Linux? Debain?
| dflock wrote:
| I run the Java server fine on my Lunix box and clients on
| Linux & ChromeOS use the browser LibreOffice plugins to
| connect to it over HTTP. Works great.
| bartmoss wrote:
| There is no reason you can't deploy the Java server nor run
| the docker container on Linux. Or do you mean a native
| client for Linux?
|
| For my Ubuntu machine as a client, I just use the web
| extension for Firefox and I also use the Visual Studio Code
| extension. I am most happy that my READMEs don't have such
| stupid errors anymore when I push them publicly where
| anyone can see. LOL
| adastra22 wrote:
| Is the text sent to the servers? That's effectively the same
| thing.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| So this is open-source, but if I want all the features (say, in
| the Mac app) I would need to pay for Premium? What if I run this
| on my own server -- would I then have access to all features?
| agentdrtran wrote:
| I've been using the paid LT for several months now and love it,
| it's been very helpful.
| chimen wrote:
| full of false positives - nothing special here, my 2c
| dewey wrote:
| Would you say it's better or worse than Grammarly? Are you
| talking about the free version or the premium version?
| drvsh wrote:
| I'm a premium user and it's not even close to what grammarly
| provides but its features are good enough to use it.
| tiff wrote:
| Hm, are you sure? Do you have an example?
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I'm fond of Vale, where you can write your own rules or grab
| others off github. I wish we could crowd source a grammarly clone
| using it. Some efforts have been made to do so, but didn't get
| far.
|
| https://github.com/errata-ai/vale
|
| https://github.com/testthedocs/Openly
| lapser wrote:
| This is super cool. How does one find rules from GitHub?
| davidjfelix wrote:
| It seems like the org has a collection of rules, but I just
| now searched by the topic and got a bunch -
| https://github.com/topics/vale
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| LT does have the functionality to add your own tools, and is
| open source and self-hostable
| polyrand wrote:
| I've been using LanguageTool for a long time, and I'm also
| happily paying their premium subscription. 100% worth it and
| highly recommended. It's also excellent at non-English languages.
| k__ wrote:
| Is it better than Grammarly?
|
| I mean, sending all data to a Grammarly service brings the same
| privacy issues as sending it to Language Tool.
| emarsden wrote:
| There is a big difference in terms of privacy: LanguageTool
| is open source and you can run it on your own computer. You
| can install it as browwer plugin, a LibreOffice plugin, or a
| standalone server that you can access from Emacs for example
| (the latter is no longer promoted on their website, but you
| can download JAR files from
| https://languagetool.org/download/).
| hemmert wrote:
| Same here, very very smart. It even gets typographic quotes
| right when nesting them (such as ,,The sign said ,yes',
| clearly."), keeps an eye on not jumping between tenses or
| different forms of addressing people (,,Du" vs. ,,Sie" in
| German).
| darekkay wrote:
| The Jetbrains Grazie plugin [1] for IntelliJ IDEA uses Language
| Tool under the hood. I've been mostly using it for checking my
| blog posts, but it can also inspect code comments and commit
| messages.
|
| [1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12175-grazie
| jmconfuzeus wrote:
| If you're a Vim user, install the vim-grammarous[0] plugin to get
| LanguageTool powered grammar checking at the speed of thought.
|
| [0] https://github.com/rhysd/vim-grammarous
| xvilka wrote:
| Is there something like that but without Java?
| bartmoss wrote:
| Maybe use the docker container to avoid any Java setup stuff?
| This is what I usually do.
|
| https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool#docker
| ushakov wrote:
| check out nlprule, it supports LanguageTool rules and is
| written in Rust
|
| https://github.com/bminixhofer/nlprule
| xvilka wrote:
| Looks amazing, thanks.
| desindol wrote:
| Mhm... the subscription is rather high for individual use. How
| does it stack up to Microsoft Editor?
| ocharles wrote:
| Oof, that is a high monthly subscription cost
| abbe98 wrote:
| For me it says SEK 58.25 ($5.64) which seems more than
| reasonable.
| capableweb wrote:
| I get EUR15.92 / month for monthly payments, EUR10.40 / month
| for quarterly and EUR3.99 / month for yearly. Are you looking
| at the yearly payments maybe?
| isaacfrond wrote:
| I'm a heavy user of LT. Very happy with it.
|
| A really nice feature of LT is that you can add your own rules. A
| rule editor is provided here:
|
| https://community.languagetool.org/ruleEditor2/
|
| Basically, whenever you catch an error in your writing you add a
| rule to ensure that it is caught the next time. After a few years
| your rule set will catch a large portion of your writing errors.
| It's fun too.
| itake wrote:
| Can you provide examples of rules you have written?
| dpaint wrote:
| The premium version has a semi-hidden AI suggestion feature. If
| you double click a word it will select the whole sentence and
| suggest rewrites that are more formal or shorter. I've found the
| AI feature great for inspiration.
| Defman wrote:
| I haven't seen any announcement of this feature from LT, but it
| looks cool! Thanks for sharing.
| textcortex wrote:
| We, at textcortex also added this AI paraphrasing feature for
| free. You can add it to your browser as chrome plugin
| avivo wrote:
| It looks like it provides out of the box support for Overleaf!
| (Collaborative LaTeX editor)
| https://www.overleaf.com/blog/635-languagetool-a-free-browse...
|
| This is not true of Grammarly last I checked, you have to hack
| something together... (e.g. https://medium.com/@tardijkhof/how-i-
| made-grammarly-seamless... )
| barankilic wrote:
| If you use VSCode as a text editor, you can use it locally on
| LaTeX files using LTeX extension (https://marketplace.visualstu
| dio.com/items?itemName=valentjn...)
| ushakov wrote:
| and if you're into Markdown, i can also recommend prosemd
|
| https://github.com/kitten/prosemd-lsp
| chessgecko wrote:
| https://quillbot.com/grammar-check is an alternative for English.
| Not open source, but very little of the grammar checker is
| paywalled if the other options seem expensive.
|
| (Disclaimer I'm a founder)
| abbe98 wrote:
| On my end Language Tool appears as 2/3th the price of your tool
| if I select a yearly subscription.
| chessgecko wrote:
| That's true, but the free tier covers almost everything in
| our grammar checker, most of the premium features are on the
| paraphraser
| azinman2 wrote:
| > "Who that is." > No problems found.
|
| Hmm.. maybe early days for English. If it's purely rule based, it
| probably be enough to catch issues like this broken fragment.
| iou wrote:
| I could see this being an option for Enterprises with concerns
| around intellectual property or sensitive data leakage.
| tiff wrote:
| Yeah, especially since enterprises often want to add their own
| writing rules (style guide)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Commenting just for informational purposes, but Grammarly
| also allows for this.
|
| This isn't an endorsement. Just saying this isn't something
| that sets LT apart.
| tiff wrote:
| Do you mean self-hosting or style guide?
| menshiki wrote:
| It's hard to test it since the majority of features are behind a
| paywall.
| zoltrix303 wrote:
| Honestly i've been using it free for over a year now and I'm
| very happy with it. I think the free tier is worth the shot.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Free tier is great, especially if you invest in writing your
| own rules.
| elashri wrote:
| Even when you selfhost your instance, It is worse than the
| free-tier unless you keep ngrams database updated routinely.
| cube00 wrote:
| Unlike other products, self hosting only gives you the same
| as their basic version. So even keeping it up to date will
| never match their premium offering. This is of course fine,
| just making people aware before they spend time setting it up
| because they don't make this very clear (I had to find a
| Github issue to get this conformation in writing)
|
| _The free self-hosted version you can download
| fromhttps://languagetool.org/download/ lacks all the premium
| rules (several thousand rules for English, German, French,
| Spanish and Dutch) and AI-based rules._ [1]
|
| [1]: https://github.com/languagetool-
| org/languagetool/issues/6750
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(page generated 2022-07-26 23:00 UTC)