Harper Is an Offline Alternative to Grammarly for Obsidian

Obsidian is my favorite productivity tool. I use it for all my writing, as a journaling app , and in place of a lot of productivity tools . However, there is a big drawback: there is no grammar checking tool.

Grammarly is the most famous grammar checking tool, but it cannot be added to Obsidian. I wouldn’t turn it on either, even if I could. Grammarly processes text on its own servers, which is a potential privacy issue and generally inefficient. That’s why I fell in love with Harper , a free, open-source alternative that runs entirely on your device and can be added to Obsidian in a couple of clicks.

Harper isn’t just an Obsidian tool: there are also plugins for WordPress, Visual Studio Code, or any developer tool that supports the language server protocol. If you’d like to see Harper in action before installing, there’s a live demo on the Harper home page – just type in whatever you want and see the recommendations.

The Harper plugin for Obsidian can be easily installed from the Community Plugins tab in Obsidian Settings, just like any other extension. Once you download and activate the plugin, it will start working immediately.

Harper can provide spelling suggestions and point out grammatical and stylistic problems. I’ve been trying Harper for a week now, missing a couple of unfortunate typos. It helped me spot easily overlooked issues without getting in my way for the most part.

What are your thoughts so far?

Potential problems are highlighted. Hover your mouse over any highlighted issue and you’ll see an explanation and suggestions.

Credit: Justin Poth

I find Harper to be noticeably faster than web tools, which makes sense given that the developer had speed in mind during development. In the settings, you can choose between American, Canadian, Australian and British English. You can also change the specific Harper’s Rule settings to allow you to use the Oxford comma.

Right now, Harper isn’t easy to use outside of Obsidian—it doesn’t have a browser extension. But if you write in Obsidian or are a developer using a supported IDE, Harper is a tool that integrates into your workflow right now and is worth a try.

More…

Leave a Reply