Better UI for Grammar Checking

Grammar checking can be cumbersome, especially when it’s sloth gets in the way of your thinking. That’s part of why so many people 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.