Harper: Project Description

What is the project about?

Harper is an English (currently American English only) grammar checker designed for speed, privacy, and efficiency. It aims to be a superior alternative to existing solutions like Grammarly and LanguageTool.

What problem does it solve?

Harper addresses the shortcomings of existing grammar checkers:

• Privacy Concerns: Unlike Grammarly, Harper processes everything locally. No data is sent to external servers, protecting user privacy.
• Performance Issues: It's significantly faster and uses far less memory than LanguageTool, making it suitable for real-time checking and integration into various editors. LanguageTool requires large downloads and significant RAM.
• Cost: While not explicitly stated as "free", the existence of crates.io and npm packages, along with the open-source nature, strongly implies a free/open-source model, contrasting with Grammarly's subscription cost.
• Accuracy and Context: Harper aims to provide more accurate and context-aware suggestions than existing tools, avoiding the "overbearing" and sometimes incorrect suggestions of competitors.

What are the features of the project?

• Fast Grammar Checking: Processes documents in milliseconds.
• Low Memory Footprint: Uses a fraction of the memory required by LanguageTool.
• Completely Private: All processing happens locally; no data is sent to external servers.
• WebAssembly Support: Can be loaded and run in a web browser via WebAssembly (demonstrated by writewithharper.com).
• Extensible Core: Designed to potentially support other languages in the future (though currently only supports American English).
• Language Server Protocol (LSP) Support: harper-ls provides integration with editors that support LSP (like Neovim, as mentioned explicitly).
• JavaScript Library: harper.js provides a JavaScript interface for integration into web applications.
• Neovim Integration: Specific support and documentation for Neovim.

What are the technologies used in the project?

• Rust: The core of Harper (and harper-ls) is likely written in Rust, given the crates.io badge and the focus on performance and memory safety.
• JavaScript/TypeScript: harper.js is a JavaScript library, and the website (writewithharper.com) likely uses JavaScript/TypeScript.
• WebAssembly: Used to compile the core logic for use in web browsers.
• Language Server Protocol (LSP): Used for editor integration.

What are the benefits of the project?

• Privacy: User data remains private.
• Speed: Fast grammar checking enables real-time feedback.
• Efficiency: Low memory usage allows it to run on a wider range of devices.
• Flexibility: Can be integrated into various environments (editors, web applications) via LSP and harper.js.
• Open Source: The project is open-source, encouraging community contributions and transparency.

What are the use cases of the project?

• Text Editors and IDEs: Integration with code editors and IDEs via the Language Server Protocol (e.g., Neovim, VS Code, etc.).
• Web Applications: Incorporating grammar checking into web-based writing tools, forums, or content management systems using harper.js.
• Browser Extensions: Potentially creating browser extensions for real-time grammar checking on any website (leveraging the WebAssembly support).
• Command-Line Tools: Using harper-ls as a command-line tool for linting documents.
• Any application requiring fast, private, and efficient English grammar checking.