Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

Looks cool, but it's weird to constantly make comparisons to Grammarly (in the title, description, benchmarks) when this is clearly a rule-based spellcheck. Tell me how it compares to the built-in spellcheck in my browser/IDE/word processor/OS.

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.

"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.

Comes with a great LSP server capable of checking grammar in code comments:

https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/language-serve...

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?

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.

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

“Yo who dis?”

Passes.

For reference: https://youtu.be/w-R_Rak8Tys?si=h3zFCq2kyzYNRXBI

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.

It is available in Autommatic's Github repository:

https://github.com/Automattic/harper

Very buggy, but great start!!

I.e. if you write an "MISTAEK" and then you scroll the highlight follows me around the page

Looks awesome! I’ll give it a try over language tool.

Is there any reason why there is no firefox extension?

I think if you can self host language tool, it would still be the better option.

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.

Good start. But still has bugs i guess.

I tried with the following phrase -- "This should can't logic be done me." --

No errors.

nice name!

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`."
        ),

Is this using local LLMs or some other engine?

Which LLM is running with Harper?