Exploring Vale Or Harper To Improve My Writing

I have used LanguageTool as my grammar checker for a few years now.. My grammar is terrible.

LanguageTool works well enough. My intention originally was to self-host it, but that never happened. I have had a paid subscription for some time now. I have been generally happy with it and would suggest it.

Last December I decided to check out Grammarly again. That was nice, but the AI stuff was sort of annoying and off-putting to me. That was at least twice the price of LanguageTool. I also checked out ProWritingAid. I really liked it, but it is on the pricier side. They do offer a lifetime subscription, which I considered pulling the trigger on sometime.

Fast forward to Yesterday I stumbled upon Harper. That is a grammar checker that is fairly new. It is written in rust. Since everything is done on my local machine, there are no privacy concerns with using it. I liked the results from the command line. That is not the most efficient way of doing it, but it does work. For a time, I used Vale the same way.

Harper has the ability to run the Language Server Protocol out of the box. That looked neat to me. I write my stuff on here in KWrite, which does not seem to support LSP. Kate does, and that is installed on my machine. It’s part of KDE. I do use that from time to time for editing en masse. I spent a good deal of time messing around with Kate yesterday trying to get it to communicate with Harper through the LSP with no luck at all. I blame that on the awful use of JSON configurations. Sure, that is nice for programs, but it’s terrible for humans. I will tinker with that more in the near future.

During my research, I came across an LSP written to use Vale. That was written in rust so it was easy enough to install even though it is not in the FreeBSD ports. I managed to get that setup working pretty quickly. One thing I like about Vale is that you can add or remove rules easily. There are rule packages available on the internet.

Harper has the rules hard-coded in the program itself, which is fine too. It is just a matter of having two ways to approach the same problem.

Both Harper and Vale are in the FreeBSD ports system, so that is nice and pretty convenient. I am trying to find ways to avoid using the cloud. It is not that am putting anything in these apps that is too private because I am publishing it here. It is more that I don’t want to be the product. They can say they are not sharing or that it is private, but we don’t really know what they are doing behind the scenes. Even if all is good and well now, who knows when and if they will sell out to one of the AI bubble companies.

I am sure there are other options out there too. I will look into those too.