Better UI for Grammar Checking

Grammar check­ing can be cum­ber­some, es­pe­cially when its sloth gets in the way of your think­ing. That’s part of why so many pre­fer Harper over Grammarly or LanguageTool. Waiting four sec­onds per edit can add up over long days of writ­ing.

But there’s some­thing else that can slow peo­ple down, es­pe­cially power users. It’s the mouse. Moving one’s hand to the point­ing de­vice, mov­ing it, and click­ing can take a while—and that adds up too.

Neovim (and sim­i­lar text ed­i­tors like Obsidian) solve this prob­lem by us­ing an­other in­put de­vice: the key­board. Since you’re us­ing the key­board to write words to the page, why not also use it to cor­rect gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes?

In the lat­est re­lease of Harper’s Chrome ex­ten­sion, that’s ex­actly what I’ve added. While writ­ing, you’re bound to make (at the very least) a few ty­pos. If that’s the case, you can now dou­ble-tap the shift key to open the sug­ges­tion popup from the er­ror clos­est to your caret. From there, you can use tab and en­ter to se­lect and ap­ply a cor­rec­tion.

I’ve per­son­ally found that this sin­gle-hand­edly speeds up my writ­ing process by at least 20%. I’m able to fo­cus less on each word and more on the con­tent.