Toying With Using Harper And A Textarea For Grammar Checking

LanguageTool has certainly served me very well over the years. The price is reasonable too and has been worth every penny I have spent on it. I have been thinking about moving on to Harper for my grammar checking though.

The program has an LSP server but it doesn’t seem to play well with Kate. At least not for my use case.

Recently I have also noticed that LanguageTool seems to be missing quite a bit and seems to be slower to check the text. Another issue is it requires me to have an internet connection.

The internet connection thing can be a bit of a problem since our Comcast connection is a steaming pile of shit. It drops almost daily and we just can’t be bothered to deal with having them come out. We will get fiber internet before that happens.

My thought process is Harper is off line so it is not requiring a network connection. A very positive side effect of that is the no connection required means it is not sharing anything back. I haven’t verified this yet but I will tomorrow.

I value privacy a lot. As time goes on the less I want to share with these services. I was okay with LanguageTool because I felt it worked really well for me. I experimented with other grammar checkers but they didn’t seem to be as reliable. I am sure that it will miss some stuff but nothing is perfect. There are pros and cons to anything out there. It is just a matter of weighing them.

For now I think I will just use the Harper setup first and then give it a try in LanguageTool and see what that one picks up. On the bright side I have noticed that Harper is very actively developed. The FreeBSD ports lag behind a bit but the Firefox add on should be pretty up to date.

While I am at it I am going to look into self hosting LanguageTool again locally. I know I have written about that in the past but my mind was just far too preoccupied back then. I had the excitement and anxiety of going to Florida for the first time and all that good stuff. My head has been a lot clearer as of late so I am happy to get back to doing this stuff.

So far though there is something to be said about the pure speed of Harper. Every tool I might try is going to miss some things. It is all about the tradeoffs. It does seem that the faster computers get the more latency there is introduced into every step of doing anything useful.