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Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly
- yablak 1y agoAny chance to make the obsidian plugin work in mobile/Android?
- thr0waway001 1y ago“Yo who dis?” Passes. For reference: https://youtu.be/w-R_Rak8Tys?si=h3zFCq2kyzYNRXBI https://youtu.be/w-R_Rak8Tys?si=h3zFCq2kyzYNRXBI
- ibobev 1y agoI'm a long-time Grammarly user. I just tried Harper, and it simply performs very poorly. It is a good initiative, but I don't feel the current state of this software to be worthwhile.
- krick 1y agoHow big is English in "English grammar checker"? Is it plausible to add other languages to it, or the underlying framework is so English-specific that it doesn't make sense to even bother building something else than English grammar checker upon it?
- punkbit 1y agoI've been a grammarly paying customer for at least 8 years. Nice to have an alternative :)
- DavideNL 1y agoInteresting, curious to try this; I wonder whether it will impact the performance (Firefox) and things will become noticeably slower... Recently i noticed highlighting extensions in Firefox were slowing things down significantly, not just loading but also while scrolling up and down web pages.
- SZJX 1y agoI was wondering about grammar checking tools in the era of LLMs, especially for grammar checks beyond English, and Sapling https://sapling.ai https://sapling.ai seemed decent. Nobody seems to have mentioned it here?
- stevenhubertron 1y agoIt says it's disabled on Outlook's web client and it's not clear why or how to enable. If I can't use this to proofread emails what is the point?
- iwinux 1y agoRemind me in 5 years when it gains enough hand-written rules to catch the most basic grammar errors LOL.
- mika6996 1y agoWhich LLM is running with Harper?
- ognarb 1y agoNone
- skeptrune 1y agoIs this using local LLMs or some other engine?
- JPLeRouzic 1y agoI don't think it uses an LLM. https://github.com/Automattic/harper https://github.com/Automattic/harper
- JPLeRouzic 1y agoIt is available in Autommatic's Github repository: https://github.com/Automattic/harper https://github.com/Automattic/harper
- sestep 1y agoAutomattic*
- djfivyvusn 1y agoAutomatic only has one t.
- sestep 1y agoNo, they spell it with two: look again at the URL that JPLeRouzic posted.
- sharkjacobs 1y agoThis seems to use a hard coded list of explicit rules, not an LLM https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e934eaeb057d0f54af8e14a78/harper-core/src/linting/phrase_corrections/mod.rs#L985 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`." ),
- a2128 1y agoFrom a quick look phrase corrections is just one type of rule. There are many other rules, some are dynamic like when to use "your" vs "you're", oxford commas, etc. That it doesn't use LLMs is its advantage, it runs in under 10ms and can be easily embedded in software and still provide useful grammar checking even if it's not exhaustive
- VTimofeenko 1y agoComes with a great LSP server capable of checking grammar in code comments: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/language-server https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/language-serve...
- pram 1y agoIMO 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.
- raincole 1y agoSo is there a similar tool but based on an LLM? Not that I think LLM is always better, but it would be interesting to compare these two approaches.
- 7thaccount 1y agoGrammarly came out before the LLMs. I'm not sure what approach it took, but they're likely feeling a squeeze as LLMs can tell you how to rewrite a sentence to remove passive voice and all that. I doubt the LLMs are as consistent (some comments below show some big issues), but they're free (for now).
- mannycalavera42 1y agoGrammarly is (was) written in Common LISP https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-production/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p... Given LISP was supposed to build "The AI" ... pretty sad than a dumb LLM is taking its place now
- chneu 1y agoThank you. In general my grammarly and gboard predictions have become so, so bad over the last year.
- boplicity 1y agoGeneral purpose LLMs seem to get very confused about punctuation, in my experience. It's one of their big areas of obvious failing. I'm surprised Grammarly would allow this to happen.
- jethro_tell 1y ago
- jacooper 1y agoI think if you can self host language tool, it would still be the better option.
- demarq 1y ago"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.
- wellthisisgreat 1y agoWhat the duck is that test
- alpb 1y agoSimilarly 0 grammatical errors flagged: "My name John. What your name? What day today?"
- Tsarp 1y agoI was initially impressed. But then I tested a bunch, it wasn't catching some really basic things. Mostly hit or miss.
- marginalia_nu 1y agoGoes the other way around too. For > In large, this is _how_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to be It suggests > In large, this is how _to_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to be
- The-Ludwig 1y agoLooks awesome! I’ll give it a try over language tool. Is there any reason why there is no firefox extension?
- chilipepperhott 1y agoThere is! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-grammar-checker-harper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-gramm...
- The-Ludwig 1y agoAwesome! Thank you :)
- IceWreck 1y agoSlightly 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.
- gglanzani 1y agoI think a lot of value comes by integrating with a language server and/or browser extensions. Do you have a setup where this is possible or do you copy paste between text fields? (Genuine question. I’d love to use a local LLM integrating with an LSP).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- orliesaurus 1y agoVery buggy, but great start!! I.e. if you write an "MISTAEK" and then you scroll the highlight follows me around the page
- crimputer 1y agoGood start. But still has bugs i guess. I tried with the following phrase -- "This should can't logic be done me." -- No errors.
- harper 1y agonice name!
- icapybara 1y agoWhy 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?
- Szpadel 1y agoI tried to use one LLM based tool to rewrite sentence in more official corporate form, and it rewrote something like "we are having issues with xyz" into "please provide more information and I'll do my best to help". LLMs are trained so hard to be helpful that it's really hard to contain them into other tasks
- Groxx 1y agouh. yes? it's far from uncommon, and sometimes it's ludicrously wrong. Grammarly has been getting quite a lot of meme-content lately showing stuff like that. it is of course mostly very good at it, but it's very far from "trustworthy", and it tends to mirror mistakes you make.
- perching_aix 1y agoDo you have any examples? The only time I noticed an LLM make a language mistake was when using a quantized model (gemma) with my native language (so much smaller training data pool).
- Breza 1y agoNot GP, but I've definitely seen cutting edge LLMs make language mistakes. The most head scratching one I've seen in the past few weeks is when Gemini Pro decided to use <em> and </em> tags to emphasize something that was not code.
- healsdata 1y agoGrammarly is all in on AI and recently started recommended splitting "wasn't" and added the contraction to the word it modified. Example: "truly wasn't" becomes "was trulyn't" https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA
- behnamoh 1y agoI 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.
- healsdata 1y agoGiven 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.
- josephcsible 1y agoIt's FOSS, so even if the worst happens, anyone could just fork the last good version and continue development there.
- jantissler 1y agoOh, that’s a big no from me then.
- cAtte_ 1y agothis 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
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paxys 1y agoLooks cool, but it's weird to constantly make comparisons to Grammarly (in the post title, description section of the site, benchmarks) when this is clearly a rule-based spellcheck and very different from what Grammarly offers. Instead tell me how it compares to the built-in spellcheck in my browser/IDE/word processor/OS.
- tolerance 1y agoI would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules that are hard coded in an open source program—meaning that I can change them—than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training data that the LLM would draw from. The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim The whole thing seems cool. Automattic should mention this on their homepage. Tools like this are the future of something.
- triknomeister 1y agoYou would lose out on evolution of language.
- phoe-krk 1y agoNatural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.
- qwery 1y agoPlease share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?
- phoe-krk 1y ago> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio gyatt rizz". It takes time for a language feature to become widespread and de-facto standardized among a population. This is because people need to asynchronously learn it, start using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even people who do not like using that feature need to start respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody understands is not a language feature, but an error. > You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules? Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar. Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even if they're different, less popular, have less formal materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in schools.
- shortformblog 1y agoLanguageTool (a Grammarly competitor) is also open source and can be managed locally: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine: https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its existence. It's nice to have options, though. It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one of the two competitors it compares itself to can also be run locally.
- unfitted2545 1y agoThis is a really nice app to use LanguageTool, it runs the server in the flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Eloquent https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Eloquent
- akazantsev 1y agoThere are two versions of the LanguageTool: open source and cloud-based. Open source checks the individual words in the dictionary just like the system's spell checker. Maybe there is something more to it, but in my tests, it did not fix even obvious errors. It's not an alternative to Grammarly or this tool.
- shortformblog 1y agoThere is. It can be heavily customized to your needs and built to leverage a large ngram data set: https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-data https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat... I would suggest diving into it more because it seems like you missed how customizable it is.
- dartharva 1y agoI never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through it once yourself? Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?
- jordanpg 1y agoI'm a lawyer. I write 10s of pages of text every day. "Reading through it once yourself" is obviously an imperfect solution. See, e.g., Poisson statistics. It's also slow and I bill in 6-minute increments. There is significant value in a grammar tool that protects confidentiality and is more effective than my wetware.
- Semaphor 1y agoI use it (well, languagetool) in the free version for comments on sites like this. It directly catches mistakes I make, that I'd normally only catch on re-reads. From typos, over my brain doing weird stuff, to sometimes things I simply didn't (actively) know.
- facundo_olano 1y agoAs a non native English speaker/writer there are a bunch of errors I miss, no matter how much attention I pay and how much I proofread, and these tools are useful to catch those.
- speedgoose 1y agoHave you considered that some people aren’t 100% fluent in English but still competent?
- victorbjorklund 1y agoI know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- raybb 1y agoWould be nice if they had a website where you could demo/test it before downloading extensions and stuff. Their firefox extension opens to this page https://writewithharper.com/install-browser-extension https://writewithharper.com/install-browser-extension but when you paste in anything more than a few paragraphs the highlighting is all messed up.
- lurk2 1y agoWho is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?
- m00dy 1y agoPeople who haven't heard of LLMs
- akazantsev 1y agoLLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type. Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.
- SilverSlash 1y agoI haven't used Grammarly but for simple things like spelling mistakes, missed articles, or punctuation, wouldn't even Google Docs be enough?
- victorbjorklund 1y agoI think it is anyone who wanna make sure they write correctly. I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.
- InsideOutSanta 1y agoAdam Engst from TidBITs, a person whose job has been writing things for all his life, also uses Grammarly: https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-writing-tools-for-serious-writers/ https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-wr...
- 1y ago
- pragmatick 1y ago"For most documents, Harper can serve up suggestions in under 10ms." 10l is OK. 10kg as well. Why is 10ms wrong?
- victorbjorklund 1y agoVery cool. Has anyone integrated this into their own app? How was your experience?
- EugeneOZ 1y agoGreat! Please create an iOS keyboard with Harper
- v5v3 1y agoI used to see ads for Grammarly and wondered if anyone was using it. Then post COVID with the increase in screen sharing video calls, I soon realised nearly every non-native English speaker from countries around the world heavily relied on it in their jobs. As I could see it installed when people share screens. Huge market, good luck.
- klabetron 1y agoOdd choice that the example text on the homepage is almost all obvious typos that a standard spell check would pick up.
- ErrorNoBrain 1y agoGreat to hear i honestly don't trust grammarly ... i mean, its essentially a keylogger. i did try it a bit once, and i never seem to have it work that well for me. But i am multilingual so maybe thats part of my hurdle
- boars_tiffs 1y agovim plug?
- chilipepperhott 1y agoThere's an LSP. Not sure if that fits your use-case, though.
- jimaek 1y agoI don't understand why we even need such services. Why don't the browsers and maybe even the OS just not improve their included grammar checkers? The Chrome enhanced grammar checker is still awful after decades. Maybe the AI hype will finally fix this? I'm still surprised this wasn't the first thing they did.
- piperly 1y agoUnfortunately, the last time I tested Harper inside Neovim, it alone used more than 1 GB of RAM for just the LSP! However, the concept is nice, open source, no AI, and easy to integrate.
- AbstractH24 1y agoMy biggest problem with Grammarly has always been how buggy the product is. From not checking random sites to messing up formatting to not updating text with the selected changes. If Harper does better at this I’d change in a minute.
- mpaepper 1y agoAre languages other than English also supported? Or is this for English only?
- ssernikk 1y agoFrom their FAQ: > We currently only support English and its dialects British, American, Canadian, and Australian. Other languages are on the horizon, but we want our English support to be truly amazing before we diversify.
- Finnucane 1y agoNo serial comma? Screw that.
- oersted 1y agoFantastic work, I was so fed up with Grammarly and instantly installed this. I'm just a bit skeptical about this quote: > Harper takes advantage of decades of natural language research to analyze exactly how your words come together. But it's just a rather small collection of hard-coded rules: https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait.Linter.html https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait... Where did the decades of classical NLP go? No gold-standard resources like WordNet? No statistical methods? There's nothing wrong with this, the solution is a good pragmatic choice. It's just interesting how our collective consciousness of expansive scientific fields can be so thoroughly purged when a new paradigm arises. LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10 years ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP work, which also replaced another few decades of symbolic grammar-based NLP work. Progress is good, but it's important not to forget all those hard-earned lessons, it can sometimes be a real superpower to be able to leverage that old toolbox in modern contexts. In many ways, we had much more advanced methods in the 60s for solving this problem than what Harper is doing here by naively reinventing the wheel.
- tough 1y agoto someone who would like to study/learn that evolution, any good recs?
- jasonjmcghee 1y agoThis skips over Bag of Words / N-Gram / TF-IDF and many other things, but paints a reasonable picture of the progression. 1. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/ 2. https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-translation-mechanics-of-seq2seq-models-with-attention/ https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-transl... 3. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/ 4. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/ 5. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/ https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/ And from there it's mostly work on improving optimization (both at training and inference time), training techniques (many stages), data (quality and modality), and scale. --- There's also state space models, but don't believe they've gone mainstream yet. https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-to-mamba-and-state https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-... And diffusion models - but I'm struggling to find a good resource so https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-demo/ https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-demo/ --- All this being said- many tasks are solved very well using a linear model and tfidf. And are actually interpretable.
- 0xjunhao 1y agoIn a world of LLMs, it's great to see classic NLP works like Harper. Both definitely have their own use cases.
- msravi 1y agoLooks very good. Was looking to replace ltex (which is really slow), but for some reason the nvim-lspconfig filetype setting for harper doesn't seem to have (la)tex listed as a default, although markdown and typst are listed. Anyone knows why?
- chilipepperhott 1y agoHarper maintainer here We've had some contributors have a go at adding LaTeX support in the past, but they've yet to succeed with a truly polished option. The irregularity of LaTeX makes it somewhat difficult to parse. We accept contributions, if anyone is interested in getting us across the finish line.
- cchance 1y agoAny chance to get it working in word? my wife would love to use it most likely
- sdtransier 1y agoHarper was acquired by Automattic in January 2025 https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper-and-elijah-potter/ https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper...
- novoreorx 1y agoSeeing Harper as an implementation of natural language's LSP brings me great joy, as it proves an idea I've had for a long time—natural language and programming languages are interconnected. Many concepts and techniques from programming languages can also be applied to natural language, making our lives more convenient. The development of LLMs and vibe coding has further blurred the boundary between natural language and programming languages, offering similar insights.
- loughnane 1y agoSurprised coming into this that I don't see anyone mentioning vale[0]. I've been using it for ~4 years now and love it. I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea. Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for moving to Harper? [0] https://vale.sh/ https://vale.sh/
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoVale requires a lot of tweaking, and I’ve never been able to get a rule set with which I’m happy. It’s missing a default rule set with rules that are generally okay without being too opinionated.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoLooks interesting for linting and cleaning markdown documentation, but it doesn't seem like a very competent "spellcheck". I'll check it out... but it doesn't actually do the same thing as Grammarly or Harper.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoHarper is decent. I've relied on Grammarly to spellcheck all my writing for a few years (dyslexia prevents me from seeing the errors even when reading it 10 times). However, I find its increasing focus on LLMs and its insistence on rewriting sentences in more verbose ways bothers me a lot. (It removes personality and makes human-written text read like AI text.) So I've tried out alternatives, and Harper is the closest I've found at the moment... but i still feel like grammarly does a better job at the basic word suggestion. Really, all I wish for is a spellcheck that can use the context of the sentence to suggest words. Most ordinary dictionary spellchecks can pick the wrong word because it's syntactically closer. They may replace "though" with "thought" because I wrote "thougt" when the sentence clearly indicates "though" is correct; and I see no difference visually between any of the three words.
- Breza 1y agoWhat's wild is that OpenAI's earlier models were trained to guess the next word in a sentence. I wonder if GPT-2 would get "though" correct more often than the latest AI-assisted writing tools like Grammerly. There are some areas where it seems like LLMs (or even SLMs) should be way more capable. For example, when I touch a word on my Kindle, I'd think Amazon would know how to pick the most relevant definition. Yet it just grabs the most common definition. For example, consider the proper definition of "toilet" in this passage: "He passed ten hours out of the twenty-four in Saville Row, either in sleeping or making his toilet."
- aagha 1y agoHave you tried Hemingway Editor?