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.
This snap bundles the harper-ls Language Server and experimental harper-cli tool.
If you store documents on an external USB drive or similar, ensure you manually connect the removable-media interface after installing the snap:
snap connect harper:removable-media
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Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.
Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, an app store with an audience of millions.
If you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.
For versions of Ubuntu between 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), as well as Ubuntu flavours that don’t include snap by default, snap can be installed from the Ubuntu Software Centre by searching for snapd.
Alternatively, snapd can be installed from the command line:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd
Either log out and back in again, or restart your system, to ensure snap’s paths are updated correctly.
To install harper, simply use the following command:
sudo snap install harper --edge
Browse and find snaps from the convenience of your desktop using the snap store snap.
Interested to find out more about snaps? Want to publish your own application? Visit snapcraft.io now.