Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-r...@lists.debian.org
* Package name : harper Version : 0.10.0 Upstream Contact: Elijah Potter * URL : https://writewithharper.com/ * License : Apache-2.0 Programming Lang: Rust Description : grammar checker for developers Harper is an 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. 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. ---- There are already the standard set of spell checkers in Debian (aspell, ispell, hunspell and so on), but new things are coming out out there. There's languagetool which we've been trying to package for decades at this point (#403619) and grammalecte entered Debian recently (but it's for French). Harper is *really* impressive: the home page, above, shows a demo that runs, *in-browser* in seemingly realtime. For the "desktop" usage, it provides an LSP interface, so that can plug pretty much in any modern editor. I don't know how much work it would be to deal with that rust package, but i would *love* to see that in Debian!
