What is it?
Harper is a free English grammar checker designed to be just right. You can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Private
Harper is completely private, in every sense of the word.
Since Harper runs on-device, your data doesn’t go anywhere you don’t want it to.
That means you have 100% certainty we don’t violate your copyright by training large language models.
Harper also intentionally avoids including any kind of generative AI in any part of our processing pipeline.
as an open-source alternative to Grammarly
intentionally avoids including any kind of generative AI in any part of our processing pipeline
Isn’t that what Grammarly is all about, though? Be better than traditional spellchecking through LLM?
I assume Harper is entirely Rules based, then? Which inherently means limited to what rules where introduced manually and what the rules cover.
I’ve used it for 5 months already, at the very least. 9/10, considering how new it is.
Do you have a comparison to other tools like Grammarly? Were you sometimes missing suggestions or linting rules?
Haven’t used Grammarly in years; however, I can tell you a couple of cons:
1: It is English-only, for now, although it has all common English dialects
2: It sometimes gets pronunciations of abbreviations wrong, although this is getting less and less common, since the developers work a lot on it
3: There aren’t plugins for it on certain editors (e.g. Notepad++), although it has for Chromium/Firefox, VS Code, among others
4: It does lack many style suggestions, but I shall reiterate that they’re working on it
Thanks! Big fan of local and on-device anything.
Very nice ill try switching from LanguageTool on EU hosted server to this
FYI: You can also run LanguageTool locally or on your own server.
How does it compare to Languagetool (which you can also run locally)?
Languagetool’s browser extension is no longer open source, which has me concerned. You can still point it at a local server, but yeah.
LT supports also languages other than English, Harper doesn’t.
From the readme:
LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.
Seems interesting, even if it’s still early in development. I’ll certainly be trying out the language server in my neovim setup anyway.
