Hacker News Reader

Comment by klohto | Hacker News Reader

https://languagetool.org for sure. Europe-based, can host your own server. Plus, it's the only one that doesn't seem to eat my Mac's battery.

Some (might be all, actually?) parts are open source as well.

View on HN

Their cookie consent form already breaks a bunch of rules by being very much opt-out first instead of opt-in for alle the marketing and tracking cookies.

This doesn't give me a good feeling that they are focused on privacy.

>https://languagetool.org for sure. Europe-based, can host your own server. Plus, it's the only one that doesn't seem to eat my Mac's battery.

>Some (might be all, actually?) parts are open source as well.

I was pretty impressed with languagetool and set up my own server (as I'm not interested in sharing with random strangers).

I used it for a while (local server, Firefox addon), but haven't used it for a while.

Yesterday I noted that the Firefox addon was chewing a goodly portion of CPU (perhaps because the local server is down?).

As such, I removed the addon and won't be going back -- not because languagetool is bad, it works quite well actually -- but because it didn't add enough value to me (note that only applies to me) to make the CPU load worthwhile.

That said, I heartily recommend self-hosted implementations of languagetool!

That looks good, thanks for sharing! Haven't heard of it. Intentionally never used Grammarly because it feels sketchy to run some keylogger.

Found them on HN randomly a year ago. I'm surprised Grammarly is still tolerated in most companies with their data collection policy.

A big bonus that LanguageTool has, is the seamless language switching. I can mix Czech and English texts and get right corrections for both.

Might be worth submitting separately on HN :)

LanguageTool is useful, I self-host it in Docker and use the VS Code extension to integrate with it, since I do most of my writing in markdown (including Dendron for my note-taking).

Even with a degree in technical writing, I still find it helps. I overuse passive voice and unnecessary words, and LanguageTool flagging them as I write is useful.

Is it possible to use languagetool in any application, such as grammarly?

How can you run it on your own server?

https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

Either what dewey said in his comment, or more direct link https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server

Just before you fall into the same trap I did of setting a self hosted version be aware:

The free self-hosted version you can download from https://languagetool.org/download/ lacks all the premium rules (several thousand rules for English, German, French, Spanish and Dutch) and AI-based rules.[1]

My suspicion is the basic self-hosted version may no better then what you would already get in something like LibreOffice.

[1]: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/issues/6750

> My suspicion is the basic self-hosted version may no better then what you would already get in something like LibreOffice.

The free rules are pretty good IMO, I never used Premium and free was already on Grammarly’s level when I switched many years ago.

Ah okay, so... either you get a simplified version or you have to put up with the same issues as Grammarly?

For developers who already have Docker running on their machine. I can strongly recommend running it locally with e.g. Docker Compose.

Safes effort with maintaining an installation and keeping the background process running. Plus, it also works when network connectivity drops.

https://github.com/Erikvl87/docker-languagetool/blob/master/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com