As there seem to be fairly regular threads on grammarly and other such tools, while I don’t use them, someone may appreciate this new free and open source local-only grammar checker:
Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong. Not to mention: it’s a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don’t sell the data, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round-trip-time of the network request makes revising your work all the more tedious.
LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.
That’s why I created Harper: it is the grammar checker that fits my needs. Not only does it take milliseconds to lint a document, take less than 1/50th of LanguageTool’s memory footprint, but it is also completely private.
Harper is even small enough to load via WebAssembly.
Not sure how this would integrate with Scrivener, I’ll leave to someone else to test it.
It integrates very well with Scrivener and everything else you allow it to. It’s easy to figure out and set up; easy to add apps for it to do its thing. EDIT: After it is installed, I cannot figure out how to run the set up to add additional software for it to access. Hmmm…
It doesn’t always catch the difference in proper usage of “it’s” and “its” unless I’m doing something wrong with its permissions. (I’ve been using it for 5 minutes.)
It’s like Hemingway Editor in assessing readability, too.
I reviewed their documentation and then tried the Mac App. This is a polished effort with much potential but I ended up deleting it because:
It didn’t tell me how to review its suggestions when a word or phrase was underlined. It took fashing around to discover you double-click on a marker to get the review pop-up.
Of the three default apps that they say they support, Mail never showed any suggestions, Messages and TextEdit did but see the above point and when I did get the popup in Messages, I couldn’t dismiss it and had to quit the application to get the popup to go away.
When I tried to add Scrivener to the list, I got a SPOD when trying to use (I presume) an Open dialog and although I know perfectly well how to find an app ID as an alternative I was by that point not willing to spend the time.
When I did get it to look (via TextEdit) at a few paragraphs it cited one of my sentences for length (41 words! Gasp!) five times and around the same number of citations for one word repeated throughout the text.
So, lots of promise but not very friendly despite the fancy accoutrements.