[HN Gopher] Harper - an open-source alternative to Grammarly
___________________________________________________________________
Harper - an open-source alternative to Grammarly
Author : ReadCarlBarks
Score : 553 points
Date : 2025-06-20 19:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (writewithharper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writewithharper.com)
| mika6996 wrote:
| Which LLM is running with Harper?
| ognarb wrote:
| None
| skeptrune wrote:
| Is this using local LLMs or some other engine?
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| I don't think it uses an LLM.
|
| https://github.com/Automattic/harper
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| It is available in Autommatic's Github repository:
|
| https://github.com/Automattic/harper
| sestep wrote:
| Automattic*
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| This seems to use a hard coded list of explicit rules, not an LLM
|
| https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules
|
| https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93...
| "PointIsMoot" => ( ["your point is mute"],
| ["your point is moot"], "Did you mean `your point
| is moot`?", "Typo: `moot` (meaning debatable) is
| correct rather than `mute`." ),
| a2128 wrote:
| From a quick look phrase corrections is just one type of rule.
| There are many other rules, some are dynamic like when to use
| "your" vs "you're", oxford commas, etc.
|
| That it doesn't use LLMs is its advantage, it runs in under
| 10ms and can be easily embedded in software and still provide
| useful grammar checking even if it's not exhaustive
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Comes with a great LSP server capable of checking grammar in code
| comments:
|
| https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/language-serve...
| pram wrote:
| IMO not using LLMs is a big plus in my book. Grammarly has been
| going downhill since they've been larding it with "AI features,"
| it has become remarkably inconsistent. It will tell me to remove
| a comma one hour, and then tell me to add it back the next.
| raincole wrote:
| So is there a similar tool but based on an LLM?
|
| Not that I think LLM is always better, but it would be
| interesting to compare these two approaches.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Grammarly came out before the LLMs. I'm not sure what
| approach it took, but they're likely feeling a squeeze as
| LLMs can tell you how to rewrite a sentence to remove passive
| voice and all that. I doubt the LLMs are as consistent (some
| comments below show some big issues), but they're free (for
| now).
| mannycalavera42 wrote:
| Grammarly is (was) written in Common LISP
| https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-
| in-p...
|
| Given LISP was supposed to build "The AI" ... pretty sad than
| a dumb LLM is taking its place now
| chneu wrote:
| Thank you. In general my grammarly and gboard predictions have
| become so, so bad over the last year.
| boplicity wrote:
| General purpose LLMs seem to get very confused about
| punctuation, in my experience. It's one of their big areas of
| obvious failing. I'm surprised Grammarly would allow this to
| happen.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| The internet, especially post phone keyboards, is extremely
| inconsistent about punctuation. I'm not sure how anyone could
| think an llm wouldn't be.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > It will tell me to remove a comma one hour, and then tell me
| to add it back the next.
|
| So just like English teachers I see
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Grammarly sometimes gets stuck in a loop, where it suggests
| changing from A to B. It then immediately suggests changing
| from B to A again, continuing to suggest the opposite change
| every time I accept the suggestion.
|
| It's not a problem; I make the determination which option I
| like better, but it is funny.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| Being dyslexic, I was an avid Grammarly user. Once it started
| adding "AI features" the deterioration was noticeable, I
| cancelled my subscription and stopped using it a year ago.
|
| I also only ever used the web app, so copy+pasting as
| installing the app is for all intentness and purposes is
| installing a key logger.
|
| Grammar works on rules, not sure why that needs an LLM,
| Grammarly certainly worked better for me when it was more dumb,
| using rules.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| DeepL Write was pretty good in the post-LLM, pre-ChatGPT era.
| Dr4kn wrote:
| DeepL is different in my opinion. They always focused on
| machine learning for languages.
|
| They must have acquired fantastic data for their Models.
| Especially because of the business language and professional
| translations which they focus on.
|
| They keep your intended message in tact and just refine it.
| Like a book post editing. Grammarly and other tools force you
| to sound like they think is best.
|
| DeepL shows, in my opinion, how much more useful a model
| trained for specific uses is.
| monkeywork wrote:
| Any suggestions for models ppl can run locally that are
| close to deepl
| harvey9 wrote:
| 'imo' and 'in my book' are redundant in the same sentence. Are
| there rules-based techniques to catch things like that? Btw I
| loved the use of 'larding' outside the context of food.
| jacooper wrote:
| I think if you can self host language tool, it would still be the
| better option.
| demarq wrote:
| "Me and Jennifer went to have seen the ducks cousin."
|
| No errors detected. So this needs a lot of rule contributions to
| get to Grammarly level.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| What the duck is that test
| canyp wrote:
| Nominative vs objective
| thfuran wrote:
| There's a little more going on than that.
| canyp wrote:
| Yeah, I stopped parsing after "Me and Jennifer".
| rdlw wrote:
| In addition to case, it's testing tense (went to have
| seen) and plural vs. posessive (ducks cousin)
| alpb wrote:
| Similarly 0 grammatical errors flagged: "My name John. What
| your name? What day today?"
| Tsarp wrote:
| I was initially impressed. But then I tested a bunch, it wasn't
| catching some really basic things. Mostly hit or miss.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Goes the other way around too. For
|
| > In large, this is _how_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to be
|
| It suggests
|
| > In large, this is how _to_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to
| be
| The-Ludwig wrote:
| Looks awesome! I'll give it a try over language tool.
|
| Is there any reason why there is no firefox extension?
| chilipepperhott wrote:
| There is!
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-gramm...
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| "Yo who dis?"
|
| Passes.
|
| For reference: https://youtu.be/w-R_Rak8Tys?si=h3zFCq2kyzYNRXBI
| IceWreck wrote:
| Slightly controversial compared to other comments here but I
| haven't used Grammerly at all since LLMs came out. Even a 4B
| local LLM is good enough to rephrase all forms of text and fix
| most grammer mistakes.
| gglanzani wrote:
| I think a lot of value comes by integrating with a language
| server and/or browser extensions.
|
| Do you have a setup where this is possible or do you copy paste
| between text fields? (Genuine question. I'd love to use a local
| LLM integrating with an LSP).
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Very buggy, but great start!!
|
| I.e. if you write an "MISTAEK" and then you scroll the highlight
| follows me around the page
| crimputer wrote:
| Good start. But still has bugs i guess.
|
| I tried with the following phrase -- "This should can't logic be
| done me." --
|
| No errors.
| harper wrote:
| nice name!
| icapybara wrote:
| Why wouldn't you want an LLM for a language learning tool?
| Language is one of things I would trust an LLM completely on.
| Have you ever seen ChatGPT make an English mistake?
| Groxx wrote:
| uh. yes? it's far from uncommon, and sometimes it's ludicrously
| wrong. Grammarly has been getting quite a lot of meme-content
| lately showing stuff like that.
|
| it is of course _mostly_ very good at it, but it 's very far
| from "trustworthy", and it tends to mirror mistakes you make.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Do you have any examples? The only time I noticed an LLM make
| a language mistake was when using a quantized model (gemma)
| with my native language (so much smaller training data pool).
| healsdata wrote:
| Grammarly is all in on AI and recently started recommended
| splitting "wasn't" and added the contraction to the word it
| modified. Example: "truly wasn't" becomes "was trulyn't"
|
| https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA
| o11c wrote:
| Hm ... I wonder, is Grammarly also responsible for the flood
| of contraction of lexical "have" the last few years? It's
| standard in British English, but outside of poetry it is
| proscribed in almost all other dialects (which only permit
| contraction of auxiliary "have").
|
| Even in British I'm not sure how widely they actually use it
| - do they say "I've a car" and "I haven't a car"?
| filterfish wrote:
| "they" say "I haven't got a car".
|
| Contractions are common in Australian English to, though
| becoming less so due to the influence of US English.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| In my experience "I've a car" is much more common than "I
| haven't a car" (I've never heard the latter construct used,
| but regularly hear the former in casual speech). "I haven't
| got a car" or "I've no car" would be relatively common
| though.
| akdev1l wrote:
| This is what peak innovation looks like
| Destiner wrote:
| I don't think an LLM would recommend an edit like that.
|
| Has to be a bug in their rule-based system?
| healsdata wrote:
| Gemini: "Was trulyn't" is a contraction that follows the
| rules of forming contractions, but it is not a widely used
| or accepted form in standard English. It is considered
| grammatically correct in a technical sense, but it's not
| common usage and can sound awkward or incorrect to native
| speakers.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I wonder how much memes like whomst'd might skew the training
| set.
| dartharva wrote:
| Because this "language learning tool" will be dominantly used
| to _avoid_ actually learning the language.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. An open-source LLM-based grammar checker with a
| user interface similar to Grammarly is probably what I'm
| looking for. It doesn't need to be perfect (none of the options
| are); it just needs to help me become a better writer by
| pointing out issues in my text. I can ignore the false
| positives, and as long as it helps improve my text, I don't
| mind if it doesn't catch every single issue.
|
| Using an LLM would also help make it multilingual. Both
| Grammarly and Harper only support English and will likely never
| support more than a few dozen very popular languages. LLMs
| could help cover a much wider range of languages.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I tried to use one LLM based tool to rewrite sentence in more
| official corporate form, and it rewrote something like "we are
| having issues with xyz" into "please provide more information
| and I'll do my best to help".
|
| LLMs are trained so hard to be helpful that it's really hard to
| contain them into other tasks
| behnamoh wrote:
| I wish it had keyboard shortcuts. As a Vim user, in Chrome it's
| tedious to click on every suggestion given by the app. Also,
| maybe add a "delay" so it doesn't think the currently-being-typed
| word is a mistake (let me finish typing first!).
|
| Otherwise, it's great work. There should be an option to
| import/export the correction rules though.
| healsdata wrote:
| Given this is an Automattic product, I'm hesitant to use it. If
| it gets remotely successful, Matt will ruin it in the name of
| profit.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It's FOSS, so even if the worst happens, anyone could just fork
| the last good version and continue development there.
| jantissler wrote:
| Oh, that's a big no from me then.
| cAtte_ wrote:
| this solution is just fundamentally insufficient. in the age of
| LLMs it's pretty insane to imagine programmers manually hard-
| coding an arbitrary subset of grammatical corrections (sure: it's
| faster, it's local first, but it's not _enough_ ). on top of
| that, English (like any other natural language) is such a
| complicated beast that you will _never_ write a classic
| deterministic parser that 's sophisticated enough to allow you to
| reliably implement even the most basic of grammatical corrections
| (check the other comments for examples). it's just not gonna
| happen.
|
| i guess it's a nice and lightweight enhancement on top of the
| good old spellchecker, though
| paxys wrote:
| Looks cool, but it's weird to constantly make comparisons to
| Grammarly (in the post title, description section of the site,
| benchmarks) when this is clearly a rule-based spellcheck and very
| different from what Grammarly offers.
|
| Instead tell me how it compares to the built-in spellcheck in my
| browser/IDE/word processor/OS.
| tolerance wrote:
| I would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules
| that are hard coded in an open source program--meaning that I can
| change them--than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt
| fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training
| data that the LLM would draw from.
|
| The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat:
| https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim
|
| The whole thing seems cool. Automattic should mention this on
| their homepage. Tools like this are the future of something.
| triknomeister wrote:
| You would lose out on evolution of language.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing
| rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think
| years versus minutes.
| qwery wrote:
| Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion
| -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to
| be making an assumption that natural languages (English,
| I'm assuming) _can be_ well defined by a simple set of
| rigid patterns /rules?
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> Please share your reasoning that led you to this
| conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly"._
|
| Languages are used to successfully communicate. To
| achieve this, all parties involved in the communication
| must know the language well enough to send and receive
| messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit
| changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to
| explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-
| lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio
| gyatt rizz".
|
| It takes time for a language feature to become widespread
| and de-facto standardized among a population. This is
| because people need to asynchronously learn it, start
| using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even
| people who do not like using that feature need to start
| respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source
| of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement
| for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point
| of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody
| understands is not a language feature, but an error.
|
| _> You also seem to be making an assumption that natural
| languages (English, I 'm assuming) can be well defined by
| a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?_
|
| Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar.
| Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even
| if they're different, less popular, have less formal
| materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in
| schools.
| qwery wrote:
| Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of
| specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do,
| perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of
| comments.
|
| I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least
| helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is
| also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also
| tends to be the source of false positives and frustration
| that lead me to disable such features altogether.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| When you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to
| be bent or broken; it's useful to have the ability to
| explicitly write new ones and make new forms of the
| language legal, rather than wrestle with hallucinating
| LLMs.
|
| When writing for utility and communication, though,
| English grammar is simple and standard enough. Browsing
| Harper sources, https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob
| /0c04291bfec25d0e93... seems to have a lot of the basics
| already nailed down. Natural language grammar can often
| be represented as "what is allowed to, should, or should
| not, appear where, when, and in which context" - IIUC,
| Harper seems to tackle the problem the same way.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just because the rules aren't set fully in stone, or can
| be bent or broken, doesn't mean they don't "exist" -
| perhaps not the way mathematical truths exist, but
| there's something there.
|
| Even these few posts follow innumerable "rules" which
| make it easier to (try) to communicate.
|
| Perhaps what you're angling against is where rules of
| language get set it stone and fossilized until the
| "Official" language is so diverged from the "vulgar
| tongue" that it's incomprehensibly different.
|
| Like church/legal Latin compared to Italian, perhaps.
| (Fun fact - the Vulgate translation of the Bible was INTO
| the vulgar tongue at the time: Latin).
| fakedang wrote:
| Aight you win fam, I was trippin fr. You're absolutely
| bussin, no cap. Harvard should be taking notes.
|
| (^^ alien language that was developed in less than a
| decade)
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes
| above the hours or days that it would take to manually
| add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or
| write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like
| skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or
| "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for
| illustrating my point.
|
| Also, it takes at most few developers to write those
| rules into a grammar checking system, compared to
| millions and more that need to learn a given piece of
| "evolved" language as it becomes impossible to avoid
| learning it. It's not only fast enough to do this
| manually, it also takes much less work-intensive and more
| scalable.
| fakedang wrote:
| Not exactly. It takes time for those words to become
| mainstream for a generation. While you'd have to manually
| add those words in dictionaries, LLMs can learn these
| words on the fly, based on frequency of usage.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| At this point we're already using different definitions
| of grammar and vocabulary - are they discrete (as in a
| rule system, vide Harper) or continuous (as in a
| probability, vide LLMs). LLMs, like humans, can learn
| them on the fly, and, like humans, they'll have problems
| and disagreements judging whether something should be
| highlighted as an error or not.
|
| Or, in other words: if you "just" want a utility that can
| learn speech on the fly, you don't need a rigid grammar
| checker, just a good enough approximator. If you want to
| check if a document contains errors, you need to define
| what an error is, and then if you want to define it in a
| strict manner, at that point you _need_ a rule engine of
| some sort instead of something probabilistic.
| efitz wrote:
| I'm glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated
| decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had
| they only been consulted first on the problem.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Which effort? Learning a language is something that can't
| be eliminated. Everyone needs to do it on their own.
| Writing grammar checking software, though, can be done
| few times and then copied.
| afeuerstein wrote:
| I don't think anyone has the need to check such a message
| for grammar or spelling mistakes. Even then, I would not
| rely on a LLM to accurately track this "evolution of
| language".
| fakedang wrote:
| What if you're writing emails to GenZers?
| dpassens wrote:
| As a zoomer, I'd rather not receive emails that sound
| like they're written by a moron.
| bombcar wrote:
| Attempting to write like a GenZ when you're not gets you
| "hello fellow kids" and "Boomer" right away.
| notahacker wrote:
| The existence of common slang which isn't used in the
| sort of formal writing that grammar linting tools are
| typically designed to promote is more of a _weakness_ of
| learning grammar by a weighted model of the internet vs
| formal grammatical rules than a strength.
|
| Not an insurmountable problem, ChatGPT will use "aight
| fam" only in context-sensitive ways and will remove it if
| you ask to rephrase to sound more like a professor, but
| RHLFing slang into predictable use is likely a bigger
| potential challenge than simply ensuring the word list of
| an open source program is sufficiently up to date to
| include slang whose etymology dates back to the noughties
| or nineties, _if phrasing things in that particular
| vernacular is even a target for your grammar linting
| tool..._
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Huh, this is the first time I've seen "noughties" used to
| describe the first decade of the 2000s. Slightly amusing
| that it's surely pronounced like "naughties". I wonder if
| it'll catch on and spread.
| harvey9 wrote:
| The fact that you never saw it before suggests it did not
| catch on and spread during the last 25 years.
| nailer wrote:
| 'Noughties' was popular in Australia from 2010 onwards.
| Radio stations would "play the best from the eighties
| nineties noughties and today".
| notahacker wrote:
| Common in Britain too, also appears in the opening lines
| of the Wikipedia description for the decade and the OED.
| dmoy wrote:
| Pedantically,
|
| aight, trippin, fr (at least the spoken version), and fam
| were all very common in the 1990s (which was the last
| decade I was able to speak like that without getting
| jeered at by peers).
| airstrike wrote:
| I don't need grammar to evolve in real time. In fact, having
| a stabilizing function is probably preferable to the
| alternative.
| eadmund wrote:
| If a language changes, there are only three possible options:
| either it becomes more expressive; or it becomes less
| expressive; or it remains as expressive as before.
|
| Certainly we would never want our language to be _less_
| expressive. There's no point to that.
|
| And what would be the point of changing for the sake of
| change? Sure, we blop use the word 'blop' instead of the word
| 'could' without losing or gaining anything, but we'd incur
| the cost of changing books and schooling for ... no gain.
|
| Ah, but it'd be great to increase expressiveness, right? The
| thing is, as far as I am aware all human languages are about
| equal in terms of expressiveness. Changes don't really move
| the needle.
|
| So, what would the point of evolution _be_? If technology
| impedes it ... fine.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So, what would the point of evolution be?
|
| Being equally as expressive _overall_ but being more
| focussed where current needs are.
|
| OTOH, I don't think anything is going to stop language from
| evolving in that way.
| canjobear wrote:
| The world that we need to be expressive about is changing.
| Polarity wrote:
| why did you use chatgpt for this text then?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I can write em-dashes on my keyboard in one second using the
| compose key: right alt + ---
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Same here -- the compose key is so convenient you forget
| most people never heard of it. This _em-dashes mean LLM
| output_ thing is getting annoying though.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > This em-dashes mean LLM output thing is getting
| annoying though.
|
| Agreed. Same with those non-ASCII single and double
| quotes.
| shortformblog wrote:
| LanguageTool (a Grammarly competitor) is also open source and can
| be managed locally:
|
| https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
|
| I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine:
|
| https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool
|
| I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its
| existence. It's nice to have options, though.
|
| It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one
| of the two competitors it compares itself to can also be run
| locally.
| akazantsev wrote:
| There are two versions of the LanguageTool: open source and
| cloud-based. Open source checks the individual words in the
| dictionary just like the system's spell checker. Maybe there is
| something more to it, but in my tests, it did not fix even
| obvious errors. It's not an alternative to Grammarly or this
| tool.
| shortformblog wrote:
| There is. It can be heavily customized to your needs and
| built to leverage a large ngram data set:
|
| https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-
| dat...
|
| I would suggest diving into it more because it seems like you
| missed how customizable it is.
| unfitted2545 wrote:
| This is a really nice app to use LanguageTool, it runs the
| server in the flatpak:
| https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Eloquent
| dartharva wrote:
| I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have
| reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be
| designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable
| of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through
| it once yourself?
|
| Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent
| in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?
| Semaphor wrote:
| I use it (well, languagetool) in the free version for comments
| on sites like this. It directly catches mistakes I make, that
| I'd normally only catch on re-reads. From typos, over my brain
| doing weird stuff, to sometimes things I simply didn't
| (actively) know.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| As a non native English speaker/writer there are a bunch of
| errors I miss, no matter how much attention I pay and how much
| I proofread, and these tools are useful to catch those.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Have you considered that some people aren't 100% fluent in
| English but still competent?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky
| https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And
| he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his
| passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than
| the average person.
| Veen wrote:
| People are bad at proofreading their own work. Professional
| writers often use third-party copy editors and proofreaders for
| that reason.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I'm a production editor at an uni press, and I can tell you
| there's not a strong correlation between professional/academic
| level and writing well.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I'm a lawyer. I write 10s of pages of text every day. "Reading
| through it once yourself" is obviously an imperfect solution.
| See, e.g., Poisson statistics. It's also slow and I bill in
| 6-minute increments. There is significant value in a grammar
| tool that protects confidentiality and is more effective than
| my wetware.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| this is the right direction. rulebased, local, transparent. not
| perfect yet, but that's not the point. getting something
| lightweight and tweakable matters more than catching every edge
| case out of the box. if it misses, you add rules. simple as that.
| if you expect it to match grammarly day one then might be we are
| missing the tradeoff
| raybb wrote:
| Would be nice if they had a website where you could demo/test it
| before downloading extensions and stuff. Their firefox extension
| opens to this page https://writewithharper.com/install-browser-
| extension but when you paste in anything more than a few
| paragraphs the highlighting is all messed up.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals
| who speak English as a second language?
| m00dy wrote:
| People who haven't heard of LLMs
| akazantsev wrote:
| LLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to
| read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article
| somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type.
|
| Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said
| everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its
| response with one sentence in the middle removed.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| I haven't used Grammarly but for simple things like
| spelling mistakes, missed articles, or punctuation,
| wouldn't even Google Docs be enough?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I think it is anyone who wanna make sure they write correctly.
| I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky
| https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And
| he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his
| passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than
| the average person.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Adam Engst from TidBITs, a person whose job has been writing
| things for all his life, also uses Grammarly:
|
| https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-
| wr...
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| "Think of how poorly the average person writes, and realize
| half of them write worse than that."
|
| _(George Carlin or something, quote 's veracity depends on
| what you mean by "average.")_
|
| I think everybody could benefit from having something like
| Grammarly on their computer. None of us writes perfectly, and
| it's always beneficial to strive for improvement.
| Veen wrote:
| I use it as a proofreader, not to improve my writing. It's
| difficult to proofread your own work, and Grammarly is a useful
| assistant. Plus, I'm British and I often write on behalf of
| American clients. I'm pretty good at following US English
| standards because I've been doing it for a long time, but the
| odd Britishism slips through and Grammarly usually catches it
| (although a standard spell checker would too, I suppose).
| pragmatick wrote:
| "For most documents, Harper can serve up suggestions in under
| 10ms." 10l is OK. 10kg as well. Why is 10ms wrong?
| ibobev wrote:
| I'm a long-time Grammarly user. I just tried Harper, and it
| simply performs very poorly. It is a good initiative, but I don't
| feel the current state of this software to be worthwhile.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Very cool. Has anyone integrated this into their own app? How was
| your experience?
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Great! Please create an iOS keyboard with Harper
| v5v3 wrote:
| I used to see ads for Grammarly and wondered if anyone was using
| it.
|
| Then post COVID with the increase in screen sharing video calls,
| I soon realised nearly every non-native English speaker from
| countries around the world heavily relied on it in their jobs. As
| I could see it installed when people share screens.
|
| Huge market, good luck.
| klabetron wrote:
| Odd choice that the example text on the homepage is almost all
| obvious typos that a standard spell check would pick up.
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| Great to hear
|
| i honestly don't trust grammarly ... i mean, its essentially a
| keylogger.
|
| i did try it a bit once, and i never seem to have it work that
| well for me. But i am multilingual so maybe thats part of my
| hurdle
| boars_tiffs wrote:
| vim plug?
| chilipepperhott wrote:
| There's an LSP. Not sure if that fits your use-case, though.
| jimaek wrote:
| I don't understand why we even need such services. Why don't the
| browsers and maybe even the OS just not improve their included
| grammar checkers?
|
| The Chrome enhanced grammar checker is still awful after decades.
|
| Maybe the AI hype will finally fix this? I'm still surprised this
| wasn't the first thing they did.
| piperly wrote:
| Unfortunately, the last time I tested Harper inside Neovim, it
| alone used more than 1 GB of RAM for just the LSP! However, the
| concept is nice, open source, no AI, and easy to integrate.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| My biggest problem with Grammarly has always been how buggy the
| product is. From not checking random sites to messing up
| formatting to not updating text with the selected changes.
|
| If Harper does better at this I'd change in a minute.
| mpaepper wrote:
| Are languages other than English also supported? Or is this for
| English only?
| ssernikk wrote:
| From their FAQ:
|
| > We currently only support English and its dialects British,
| American, Canadian, and Australian. Other languages are on the
| horizon, but we want our English support to be truly amazing
| before we diversify.
| Finnucane wrote:
| No serial comma? Screw that.
| oersted wrote:
| Fantastic work, I was so fed up with Grammarly and instantly
| installed this.
|
| I'm just a bit skeptical about this quote:
|
| > Harper takes advantage of decades of natural language research
| to analyze exactly how your words come together.
|
| But it's just a rather small collection of hard-coded rules:
|
| https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait...
|
| Where did the decades of classical NLP go? No gold-standard
| resources like WordNet? No statistical methods?
|
| There's nothing wrong with this, the solution is a good pragmatic
| choice. It's just interesting how our collective consciousness of
| expansive scientific fields can be so thoroughly purged when a
| new paradigm arises.
|
| LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10 years
| ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP work,
| which also replaced another few decades of symbolic grammar-based
| NLP work.
|
| Progress is good, but it's important not to forget all those
| hard-earned lessons, it can sometimes be a real superpower to be
| able to leverage that old toolbox in modern contexts. In many
| ways, we had much more advanced methods in the 60s for solving
| this problem than what Harper is doing here by naively
| reinventing the wheel.
| tough wrote:
| to someone who would like to study/learn that evolution, any
| good recs?
| chilipepperhott wrote:
| I'll admit it's something of a bold label, but there is truth
| in it.
|
| Before our rule engine has a chance to touch the document, we
| run several pre-processing steps that imbue semantic meaning to
| the words it reads.
|
| > LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10
| years ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP
| work, which also replaced another few decades of symbolic
| grammar-based NLP work.
|
| This is a drastic oversimplification. I'll admit that
| transformer-based approaches are indeed quite prevalent, but I
| do not believe that "LLMs" in the conventional sense are
| "replacing" a significant fraction of NLP research.
|
| I appreciate your skepticism and attention to detail.
| 0xjunhao wrote:
| In a world of LLMs, it's great to see classic NLP works like
| Harper. Both definitely have their own use cases.
| msravi wrote:
| Looks very good. Was looking to replace ltex (which is really
| slow), but for some reason the nvim-lspconfig filetype setting
| for harper doesn't seem to have (la)tex listed as a default,
| although markdown and typst are listed. Anyone knows why?
| chilipepperhott wrote:
| Harper maintainer here
|
| We've had some contributors have a go at adding LaTeX support
| in the past, but they've yet to succeed with a truly polished
| option. The irregularity of LaTeX makes it somewhat difficult
| to parse.
|
| We accept contributions, if anyone is interested in getting us
| across the finish line.
| cchance wrote:
| Any chance to get it working in word? my wife would love to use
| it most likely
| sdtransier wrote:
| Harper was acquired by Automattic in January 2025
|
| https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper...
| novoreorx wrote:
| Seeing Harper as an implementation of natural language's LSP
| brings me great joy, as it proves an idea I've had for a long
| time--natural language and programming languages are
| interconnected. Many concepts and techniques from programming
| languages can also be applied to natural language, making our
| lives more convenient. The development of LLMs and vibe coding
| has further blurred the boundary between natural language and
| programming languages, offering similar insights.
| loughnane wrote:
| Surprised coming into this that I don't see anyone mentioning
| vale[0]. I've been using it for ~4 years now and love it.
|
| I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea.
| Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in
| google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for
| moving to Harper?
|
| [0] https://vale.sh/
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Looks interesting for linting and cleaning markdown
| documentation, but it doesn't seem like a very competent
| "spellcheck". I'll check it out... but it doesn't actually do
| the same thing as Grammarly or Harper.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Vale requires a lot of tweaking, and I've never been able to
| get a rule set with which I'm happy.
|
| It's missing a default rule set with rules that are generally
| okay without being too opinionated.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Harper is decent.
|
| I've relied on Grammarly to spellcheck all my writing for a few
| years (dyslexia prevents me from seeing the errors even when
| reading it 10 times). However, I find its increasing focus on
| LLMs and its insistence on rewriting sentences in more verbose
| ways bothers me a lot. (It removes personality and makes human-
| written text read like AI text.)
|
| So I've tried out alternatives, and Harper is the closest I've
| found at the moment... but i still feel like grammarly does a
| better job at the basic word suggestion.
|
| Really, all I wish for is a spellcheck that can use the context
| of the sentence to suggest words. Most ordinary dictionary
| spellchecks can pick the wrong word because it's syntactically
| closer. They may replace "though" with "thought" because I wrote
| "thougt" when the sentence clearly indicates "though" is correct;
| and I see no difference visually between any of the three words.
| yablak wrote:
| Any chance to make the obsidian plugin work in mobile/Android?
| krick wrote:
| How big is English in "English grammar checker"? Is it plausible
| to add other languages to it, or the underlying framework is so
| English-specific that it doesn't make sense to even bother
| building something else than English grammar checker upon it?
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