Harper is a grammar checker that is on-device and open source

"When it comes to grammar checking, Grammarly is the premium tool for it. It's a proprietary tool and it was among the first one to make a mark as a web-based Grammar checking tool. Then there is LanguageTool that is/was open source, made in Germany and offers hosted service for free or for a price (you get additional features). LanguageTool was acquired a couple of years back and since then it's privacy policy has changed as it processes data on US servers, instead of European ones."

I'm trying out Harper and although it works fine, it is a very new product (less than a year old), so there are some improvements that can be made. For example, I'd like to see auto-correction rules we can add ourselves for whenever I type teh to be changed to the. But it is being updated regularly I see.

Right now too it only supports English (but being open source I think that will change soon).

It has plugins for Firefox, Chrome, Obsidian, WordPress, and it can be integrated into various code editors as well as into JavaScript/TypeScript/Rust codebases.

There are no mobile apps as the view is that most keyboards have their own built-in spell and grammar checkers.

But the privacy-first approach does mean no data going into someone's cloud, and does mean also better speed and even working offline. That would also mean right now no syncing of personal dictionaries across devices, but I'm sure that can be added in time to use Nextcloud, Dropbox, and other personal cloud services.

See https://itsfoss.com/harper-grammar-checker and GitHub site at https://github.com/Automattic/harper

#technology #opensource #spellchecker #privacy