- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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.
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