Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

by runjuu • 1 year ago

408 209 1 year ago

gbalduzzi• 1 year ago

Does this only supports English?

runjuu2• 1 year ago

Theoretically, it could support over 140 languages, as it is powered by the newly released Gemma 3n model. However, I haven’t tested many languages yet.

In upcoming releases, Refine will support custom prompts and BYOK (Bring Your Own Key), allowing you to use any large language model you want.

pyman2• 1 year ago

What's the rationale behind adding BYOK? Or the advantages?

You do realise you're already using an optimised model built for everyday devices, and that model includes some serious innovations in parameter-efficient processing, right?

You're a great developer, and it looks like you're thinking about adding features like BYOK quickly to please more users. But in doing that, you might be missing the real innovation you've already created. You've basically built a version of Grammarly without the privacy issues that make most IT departments ban it.

No one wants Grammarly or your tool sending corporate emails or documents to a language model. Privacy is what sets you apart from Grammarly. It's your biggest feature right now. Add a big table to your site comparing your products privacy with Grammarly's. That's your strongest selling point, and probably the only feature that can truly compete with the big players.

My advice? Keep improving the app, but keep the model local. Keep it private. That's the killer feature you've got.

planb• 1 year ago

Seams weird to not have "How does this compare to Apple Intelligence Writing Tools" at least in the FAQ. Maybe refine is better or has more features, but the page doesn't even seem to acknowledge that a system level feature like this exists.

Nicell• 1 year ago

Neat idea. I see why the fluency feature is off by default. It constantly rewords things, adds random quotations, or does something pretty silly https://imgur.com/oVSWmtN

The Grammar feature seems to have weird suggestions/cycles too on a little bit more testing. Curious to see how this improves. A local only, one-time-purchase grammarly alternative is appealing!

mirrormaster• 1 year ago

Isn't privacy a concern? How do consumers ensure that data is not going to captured in a future update without it being open source or having third party security audits?

awestroke• 1 year ago

That's a concern with all apps ever so idk what answer you're expecting

mananaysiempre• 1 year ago

Except the open-source ones, or sandboxed[1] ones without any auto-update functionality (not sure if this app has any).

[1] Loosely; I’d say not referencing any networking entrypoints or dlsym() also counts, as working around that would be very non-deniably malicious.

reconnecting6• 1 year ago

Disagreed. It's not concerned with all apps, because most commercial applications have legal entities explaining how they use collected data. In this particular case, this is something called 'Refine', and it's not a legal entity, therefore, questioning its data privacy approach is fully legitimate.

reconnecting6• 1 year ago

I also strongly believe that it’s a primary question when we talk about keyboard input.

Deukhoofd• 1 year ago

Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.

boramalper• 1 year ago

+1. Also worth noting that both LanguageTool [0] and Harper [1] are FOSS.

[0] https://languagetool.org/

[1] https://writewithharper.com/

yencabulator• 1 year ago

Harper is an Automattic asshole property now: https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper...

raegis• 1 year ago

I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.

Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.

codesnik• 1 year ago

browser rendering does. You'd need white-space: pre-wrap rule to retain double spaces.

dreamcompiler3• 1 year ago

Extra space after periods is never correct with proportionally-spaced fonts, which is why all browsers remove it by default.

Two spaces after periods is a kludge invented for typewriters that had monospaced fonts and touch typing teachers need to stop teaching it in the modern era where most writing uses proportional fonts.

chilipepperhott6• 1 year ago

Harper will detect those errors in its next release.

scottfr• 1 year ago

We're building a Chrome extension grammar checker that runs locally using Chrome's built-in LLM.

You can try it out here:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grammit-the-ai-gram...

LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

slacktivism1232• 1 year ago

LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!

Someone1234• 1 year ago

I've run LanguageTool Server with the ngrams[0] for years, it is legitimately excellent with the ngrams (and mediocre without). The English-only ngrams are roughly 15 GB on disk.

Just have a Windows Scheduled Task kick off this bat file:

     SET PATH=SET PATH=C:\program files\Amazon Corretto\jdk17.0.15_6\bin\
     start javaw -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081 --allow-origin "*" -l en-US --languageModel "C:\LanguageTool\LanguageTool-6.3\ngram"

[0] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

smartmic• 1 year ago

Worth to mention as another alternative: Harper[0]

[0] https://writewithharper.com/

patrakov4• 1 year ago

Harper is so basic that I can't recommend it.

Does not catch a singular/plural discrepancy between the subject and the verb in a sentence--a common mistake when the expressed thought applies equally to one thing or to many things.

Does not catch a missed indefinite article--a common mistake for speakers of languages that don't have articles. Similarly, does not catch the use of the indefinite article for a thing already mentioned before.

Does not even catch the obvious "don;t" typo.

clay10• 1 year ago

Have you raised these as issues? The developer has been extremely responsive in my experience.

I use Harper in my Neovim setup and its been great. I just add things that are missing from the dictionary when I come across them in my codebase

speckx• 1 year ago

Open ticket about "don;t" typo, see https://github.com/Automattic/harper/issues/1559

InsideOutSanta2• 1 year ago

This is precisely what I've been hoping somebody would build. In my initial testing, it works well. I can even mix sentences with different languages, and it still makes correct suggestions.

The fluency suggestions are seemingly largely malfunctioning. It frequently suggests starting and ending sentences with quotes, although it also makes some useful suggestions. There seems to be an issue with analysis running synchronized, or something like that; when I type into a text field and Refine starts to run, it often blocks text entry. Selecting a suggested replacement blocks the app for half a second or so. Neither of these problems occurs with Grammarly or Language Tool. I also noticed a bunch of issues that Grammarly catches (like verb agreement) that Refine does not.

But this is an amazing first release and extremely promising. Congrats!

nk8620• 1 year ago

why is there no open source alternatives to this? Seems ripe to be just built.

chilipepperhott6• 1 year ago

Harper?

https://github.com/Automattic/harper

janpmz• 1 year ago

How big is the model that powers this?

patrakov4• 1 year ago

8B (Gemma 3n)

pyman2• 1 year ago

https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma-3n

Yoric• 1 year ago

What I'd be interested in would be something I could host on my local server (e.g. with ollama) to get suggestions on my laptop, where I write typst or markdown with Zed or VSCode.

I realize I'm a niche :)

Does anybody know of such a tool?

Yeri• 1 year ago

I'm missing some information on how this works (a LLM? which? Do I need to bring an API key? Does this work offline?) and what I can expect in terms of performance/battery hit.

parkcedar• 1 year ago

Lightning Fast. Local processing means instant results without internet dependency or delays. Always Available. Works offline, on flights, in coffee shops, anywhere you write.

Two of your 4 questions were answered in the first content block

zipping1549• 1 year ago

Considering that it mentions offline capability I'd say local tiny LLM.

d3m0t3p• 1 year ago

It is Gemma 3n, I can't give feedback yet on the battery hit, But I would not expect anything bad as these models have been developed for much smaller devices (Phones)

diimdeep• 1 year ago

It does this

    This phrase is offensive and violates my safety guidelines. Therefore, I will not revise it. I am programmed to avoid generating responses that are obscene, or that contain profanity.

because what's under the hood is this, and prompts are hardcoded

unsloth/gemma-3n-E4B-it-GGUF

    You are a precision editor guided by a custom style manual. Your tasks are ordered by priority.
    Your primary rule is to consult the provided REFERENCE DICTIONARY. Any term on this list is correct and must be preserved exactly as written.
    Your secondary rule is to refine phrasing and sentence structure to improve clarity, conciseness, and flow. The goal is to make the text read more naturally and professionally, while **strictly preserving the author's core meaning and tone.**
    Your final rule is to output ONLY the clean, revised text. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations.
    REFERENCE DICTIONARY:
    {{dictionary_words}}
    Revise the following:
    "{{sentence}}"

    You are an expert editor. Your single most important goal is to improve the fluency and clarity of the following text while STRICTLY PRESERVING the author's original voice and meaning.
    You MUST follow these rules:
    1.  Only rephrase sentences that are genuinely awkward or unclear.
    2.  Never make changes for purely stylistic preference.
    Return ONLY the clean, revised text.
    Revise the following:
    "{{sentence}}"
    {{dictionary_words}}

    You are a silent grammar correction engine with a custom style guide.
    Your primary rule is to consult the provided REFERENCE DICTIONARY. Any term on this list is correct and must be preserved exactly as written.
    Your secondary rule is to correct all other grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in the main text.
    Your final rule is to output ONLY the clean, corrected text. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations.
    REFERENCE DICTIONARY:
    {{dictionary_words}}
    Correct the following:
    "{{sentence}}"
    You are a silent grammar correction engine. Your sole function is to receive text and output the corrected version. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations. You will only return the clean, corrected text.
    Correct the following:
    "{{sentence}}"

slacktivism1232• 1 year ago

Incredible. Has any non-AI grammar checker ever returned a "safety" refusal to the user before? Is this the power of LLM wrappers?

pmdr2• 1 year ago

Imagine if WinRAR didn't let you archive or name your files what you want. How we were trusted with such DESTRUCTIVE tools all these years is beyond me. /s

Inviz• 1 year ago

Couldnt make it to show suggestions in vscode/cursor. I would like to use the tool, but i'd expect it to work consistently across all widgets in the system (i.e. like superwhisper). Is there a technical limitation here or my misconfiguration of things?

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:

Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.

In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:

I go to my practice to practise medicine.

The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

I get this.

... in 'full fat' English ...

English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

Setting the bar where it is well written and unambiguously understandable is IMHO completely fine for a 15$ product.

Having a text spell checked to comply with contemporary Oxford English is likely not the goal of this product.

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).

If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny

physicsguy2• 1 year ago

You still need to adapt it to where you are though, people expect this because it causes misunderstandings. If I as a British person go to the US, I know that I can't ask people to go and buy some booze from the off-license and when finished ask them to put their aluminium can in the bin ready for the rubbish lorry while wearing their jumper because that sounds anachronistic.

tobylane• 1 year ago

contemporary Oxford English

If you chose Oxford because of the Oxford English Dictionary, note that it's not regular en-gb, it's en-gb-oxendict. "the OED often favo[u]rs "-ize" (and its derivatives) over "-ise" for words derived from Greek roots, and may also include historical or less common usages."

Normal_gaussian• 1 year ago

Lets be fair here, this tool is new - the domain was registered on Saturday.

What you suggest does seem like a good early doors feature; but the cut they've made seems to be the right one to prove market potential.

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.

nicce• 1 year ago

I have no idea how this tool is better than running local LLM. Should I buy it?

adastra222• 1 year ago

So you’re saying that for most English speakers it was correct, and that’s a problem?

vintagedave2• 1 year ago

There are many different Englishes. I would bet that this tool does not handle Indian or Malaysian dialects.

British English is still influential over most of the Commonwealth, ie a large number of countries.

dreamcompiler3• 1 year ago

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour.

If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

vintagedave2• 1 year ago

I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.

It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?

butshouldyou• 1 year ago

Huge quantities of english speakers, who are not from the Commonwealth, learn British English.

beAbU5• 1 year ago

and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth

What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping?

Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default to US English.

JLCarveth• 1 year ago

Americans finding anyone else arrogant is quite rich.

anotherevan• 1 year ago

That's very colorful[sic] thinking.

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?

limagnolia• 1 year ago

It gives off arrogant vibes to have one accuse Americans of being arrogant for using alternative spellings.

speedgoose• 1 year ago

As a Frenchman, I enjoy writing colour and being arrogant.

stronglikedan• 1 year ago

you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

That is simply not true. Maybe that's how you feel about it, but it is generally not the case (or even considered, really).

BrandoElFollito3• 1 year ago

I learned colour at school in France.

johnisgood2• 1 year ago

I thought the difference between practice vs. practise was that the latter is British. My spell checker (US English) does not like "practise" though, it is underlined with red. UK English, however, does not underline "practise" with red. So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English? Because based on the spell checker, that seems to be the case.

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English?

Correct: practice is a noun, and practise is a verb, in non-US English. I don't have my (twenty-volume) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but Wiktionary has an explanation under 'usage notes': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practise

rafram• 1 year ago

Describing American English as “simplified” English is textbook bad linguistics. It’s a different dialect, not an inherently simpler or more complex one.

NewsaHackO• 1 year ago

Yea, it’s insane to try and an entire country’s writing dialect as simplified. I guess it would be the only way to show off his snobbery though.

cjs_ac6• 1 year ago

It's an old meme: https://imgur.com/thats-bit-harsh-steam-XCEdD8W

In the UK, it's considered good form to be humorous when making an argument; I gather that in the US, you're supposed to sound like you're making a speech to prepare troops for war. I apologise if, in the course of describing how a product is unsuitable for use in my culture, I made that argument according to the norms of my culture.

throwaway2025_1• 1 year ago

Could the 'Simplified Spelling Board'[1] of 1906 have anything to do with the naming?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

signaturefish• 1 year ago

Simplified English is a thing that exists, for clarity - see for example https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice

I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.

18172828286177• 1 year ago

For what it’s worth, I’m a native British English speaker and don’t instinctively consider “practice” “grammatically incorrect”. Indeed, I would probably write “practice” myself.

jonathanstrange2• 1 year ago

That's why you need a good spellchecker.

anonymous_sorry• 1 year ago

Pretty sure I had this corrected on more than one occasion when I was at school. Also licence/license. I remember one day figuring out the parallel with advice/advise as a way to remember which was which. So C for the noun and S for the verb.

Weirdly (to my brain), Americans always spell practice with a C, but always spell license with an S.

darinpantley• 1 year ago

Case in point: "Is there a educational discount?" I believe this should say "an educational discount". I wonder if the tool would have caught it.

itslennysfault3• 1 year ago

Did the website originally say this? I just checked and it says "an" now... Perhaps they didn't use their own tool when writing the web copy.

satvikpendem2• 1 year ago

There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed:

OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729

JustBreath• 1 year ago

The elephant in the room here is how you ethically get people to onboard without an existing community / fomo / money.

The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them.

Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.

tshaddox2• 1 year ago

Fluent American readers are likely to think "practise" is a typo. It's not even one of the commonly-known British/American spelling differences (like "color"/"colour"). Unless you know your audience is likely to be more familiar with British spelling, I'd avoid "practise."

xwolfi6• 1 year ago

They're not very smart then: most non-native people know there are several big mainstream ways to spell English, and we learn that on top of our own languages.

Couldn't American schools teach English the same way, like, that there are no single proper way ?

thayne• 1 year ago

In American English, "practise" is incorrect. So if the screenshot is taken from a user using the en_US locale it is correct. Perhaps, if your locale is en_GB it will correct "practice" to "practise", but you can't know that from a screenshot.

OkayPhysicist• 1 year ago

Calling American spelling "simplified" is anachronistic. It'd be more accurate to call British English "embellished". UK English was irreparably damaged by some smug wannabe-Frenchmen who decided there weren't enough unpronounced letters in English after we broke off.

londons_explore2• 1 year ago

Powered by local AI models

I worry that this will make my writing more likely to fail an AI coursework detector, which could really impact my life. The risk just isn't worth it till someone has tested the output through all the big players (turnitin etc.)

raincole• 1 year ago

If I use correct punctuation marks my work will be more likely to be \detected\ as AI written; The risk just isn"t worth it so I never do that^

FabHK2• 1 year ago

It's hilarious, on some other sites one is immediately accused of using ChatGPT when using the n-dash (–) or m-dash (—) instead of the hyphen (-). Not an issue with the monospaced font here. ETA: I stand corrected.

InsideOutSanta2• 1 year ago

We'll soon need a writing tool that introduces spelling and grammar errors into our text and messes with punctuation so that we aren't accused of using LLMs.

itslennysfault3• 1 year ago

I don't think the risks are high with this. It's not writing for you. It's just correcting your grammar. If you're 99% writing it yourself and just having it highlight grammar mistakes I wouldn't expect it to trigger an alarm....... but I haven't been in school since waaay before LLMs were viable/common. So, maybe it's worse than I think.

admiralrohan• 1 year ago

If you are running local LLMs what is the hardware requirement in my machine? Don't see any mention of that.

ggerganov• 1 year ago

Gemma 3n (the model used by this app) would run on any Apple Silicon device (even with 8GB RAM).

chilipepperhott6• 1 year ago

Yup, but you're automatically giving up a ton of RAM that could be better used for Slack.

smcleod5• 1 year ago

How well does it handle standard international English? So many of the tools I've seen seem to only support American English.

Andrew_nenakhov4• 1 year ago

Speaking of which, isn't it time to consider American English to be the standard one?

Colour and licence are so quaint.

smcleod5• 1 year ago

Well, only Americans use it. There's no point in arguing about it your version of a language is better or worse but for the rest of the world it's incredibly annoying having to correct Zs with Ss when using LLMs or American only software.

richrichardsson• 1 year ago

I could care less about this attempt at trolling, but I won't.

We have enough American cultural hegemony as it is. It frustrates me no end that I regularly am unable[1] to configure software to use my preferred version of English.

[1] or it's extremely difficult. CLion I'm looking at you; every available option I have is set to British English, but still you insist on telling me my Colours should be corrected to Color etc. :(

beAbU5• 1 year ago

I think we need to call American English "American", then you can speak American and I can speak English.

BoredPositron2• 1 year ago

Europe still teaches British English in schools.

jasekt• 1 year ago

Wonderful! I've given it a go, works in Apple's Notes app, but it does not seem to trigger suggestions in Chrome, Firefox or Slack. It does however highlight misspellings there. Any idea what can I do to enable suggestions there? I was looking for a product like this.

drowe859• 1 year ago

Same! Interested in this but need it to work for Slack, where I often type more informally and don't take the time I should to proofread.

rubslopes2• 1 year ago

Same here, but Siri also does not trigger its textual improving LLM thingy in the context menu in Firefox.

gardnr• 1 year ago

You can use a local instance of LanguageTool in a docker container for this:

https://github.com/gardner/LocalLanguageTool

DonsDiscountGas• 1 year ago

A lot of people would rather pay $15 than mess with docker containers

koiueo3• 1 year ago

Gosh people love complicating things.

You don't need docker (a Linux-only piece of tech) to run a java application. Even though I'm on Linux, and docker experience is waaaaay better here than on any other platform, I wouldn't in my life consider using it to run LanguageTool.

  java -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer

idoubtit• 1 year ago

A command without context is not very useful. If anyone wants to run LanguageTool locally, I suggest reading the official documentation page: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server

Their recommended process is :

1. Install fasttext (it's an official Debian package, but you have to compile it on Windows).

2. Download and uncompress the LanguageTool release.

3. Create a config file.

4. Launch the server with the java command (of course, a JRE must be installed).

5. Connect to the API, e.g. with the browser extension.

Running a ready-made docker image replaces steps 1-4 and removes the need to install Java globally. Some will prefer it this way.

itslennysfault3• 1 year ago

Gosh people love complicating things.

You don't need to fight with installing (the correct version of) java. I wouldn't in my life consider installing java on my OS directly.

For anyone with docker already installed (most people these days)...

  git clone git@github.com:gardner/LocalLanguageTool.git

  cd LocalLanguageTool

  docker compose up

ho_schi• 1 year ago

There is also a readily installable Flatpak:

https://github.com/sonnyp/Eloquent

It is restricted by Flatpak (i.e. Control Groups and Namespaces):

   * No file-system access
   * No access to devices
   * Network Access is allowed (API of Languagetool is only reachable via REST?)

It is fat. But that's more an issue of Java itself. I only wish Languagetool didn't use Java, which is fine on a servers but horrible on personal-computers. Implemented in C, C++ or Rust and it would be probably already part of LibreOffice. Sonny Piers is the packager Flatpak, a prominent ex-member of GNOME board. He was removed due some Code-Of-Conduct thing which nobody can explain, due to issues within the Code-Of-Conduct.

PS: LibreOffice had to fight years to remove Java which plagued the project.

xd1936• 1 year ago

TIL LibreOffice has finally removed Java. Thanks for educating me.

illiac7862• 1 year ago

LanguageTool only works in the browser though, or am I missing something?

nusl• 1 year ago

I've installed it to give it a try but it does absolutely nothing in any application I use. I did give it required permissions.

gregjw• 1 year ago

It'd be neat if there was an open source solution this polished.

utf_8x• 1 year ago

Holy crap, a local-only app with one-time purchase *and* a free demo? You don't see that very often these days

AbstractH24• 1 year ago

My biggest problem with Grammarly is how buggy it is. How often it doesn’t work as intended and either messes up formatting or doesn’t change the text when I click.

Does Refine solve this?

atmosx• 1 year ago

I would pay 50$ a year if this had a vim integration.

rsoury• 1 year ago

If this were open source AGPL it'd be an insta-download.

wkjagt• 1 year ago

Very cool product. And thank you for not making it a subscription.

Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Feel free to sent us an email at support@refine.sh

Should be "send". Especially with this kind of product, you shouldn't have grammar mistakes on the website :)

amelius• 1 year ago

I'm really wondering if/why Grammarly still has a business case, in this age of LLMs.

koiueo3• 1 year ago

It's beyond me how they still refuse to offer an official API.

Gemini subscription costs as much, allows me to do much more, and I can call it from vim or emacs without some arcane acrobatics

netule• 1 year ago

They used to have an API, which they removed about two years ago or so. Until then, there were a bunch of 3rd-party Grammarly plugins, including a pretty decent one for VSCode.

pmdr2• 1 year ago

Mainly because (cloud-hosted, bigger & smarter) LLMs probably offer no added privacy benefit. Self-hosted models are dumber, neutered and unpredictable.

mcapodici• 1 year ago

Languagetool is an open source tool you can run as a local spelling and grammar checker. It's different to Grammarly - less AI and more rules based. I often use both tools at the same time. I wrote a quick intro on how to self host this - https://martincapodici.com/2025/05/10/check-your-writing-usi....

illiac7862• 1 year ago

LanguageTool only works in the browser though, as far as I can tell?

amake• 1 year ago

There is a local-only, no-signup-required executable available at https://languagetool.org/download/

They don't advertise this because they are trying to push their paid online services. I have complained about this, but they didn't seem to care.

reconnecting6• 1 year ago

There is no guarantee that this software will not occasionally start acting as a keylogger. If somehow this happens (let's assume not intentionally), will it be the direct responsibility of the author?

Legally, there is no entity behind that responsible for privacy (1), and honestly, I don't see even minimal reason to trust this software from a legal perspective.

1. https://refine.sh/privacy-policy

woadwarrior01• 1 year ago

There's no reason to trust it from a technical perspective either. The app is unsandboxed. Easy enough to check from the CLI.

    codesign --display --verbose=4 Refine.app 2>&1 | grep sandbox

Apple provides a network client entitlement[1] that sandboxed apps must have, to connect to the network. Since this app isn't sandboxed, that restriction doesn't apply.

Personally, I only use software that was either built on my machine or downloaded off of the Mac App Store (MAS apps have the be mandatory sandboxed).

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

reconnecting6• 1 year ago

Most of the time, both legal and technical misalignments walk together. Thank you for noticing this.

runjuu2• 1 year ago

Well, I understand the security benefits of sandboxing. However, Apple's sandbox restrictions prevent apps from using Accessibility APIs, which are essential for Refine to read and enhance text across different applications.

Many popular apps, like Grammarly and Raycast, are also not sandboxed for the same reason. Without these APIs, Refine wouldn’t be able to provide a seamless text refinement experience. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we just use ChatGPT to correct the grammar?

throwawayffffas3• 1 year ago

Isn't that true of all software? How do you know that grammarly is not already doing that your data is transmitted to their servers after all.

reconnecting6• 1 year ago

Not at all. Most commercial software has a publisher (as legal entity) that is responsible for privacy and takes reputational risks if something goes wrong.

sgarland• 1 year ago

Does this do tone? That is the single largest feature of Grammarly’s Slack plugin that I absolutely loved, and if my work allowed it, I’d have it again.

chilipepperhott6• 1 year ago

LLM usage would immediately disqualify this from most academic writing.

AdilZtn• 1 year ago

Could you elaborate why?

patrakov4• 1 year ago

Just guessing: the rules, as they are written, prohibit any usage of LLMs (not just for text generation), and, as is the case with any regulations, must be interpreted literally.

nakovet• 1 year ago

Minor thing with the website but the download button is not entirely clickable, if you don't click on the text you don't get to download it, due to the div > a and the anchor being just the text, consider styling the anchor to have the padding so the whole thing is clickable. :)

j45• 1 year ago

I wonder if there was some complexity with internationalizing or localizing English (UK English, etc) outside of the primary build case.

diekhans• 1 year ago

No API to hook into one's favorite tools, such as emacs.

gaws• 1 year ago

LanguageTool works perfectly with Emacs.

odo1242• 1 year ago

Has anyone tested how this works in comparison to locally-hosted LanguageTool?

throwawayffffas3• 1 year ago

Does anyone know of an equivalent for translations, ideally open source though?

valorantPanda• 1 year ago

Nice product! Does it support other language like Chinese?

lessurliu• 1 year ago

I tried it and it worked pretty well. I'm curious about the principle behind it. Is there any model or API being called?

sarmadgulzar• 1 year ago

I see that you're using gemma3n which is a 4B parameter model and utilizes around 3GB RAM. How do you handle loading/offloading the model into the RAM? Or is it always in the memory as long as the app is running?

chilipepperhott6• 1 year ago

I can see this as a major issue. If you start using this for grammar checking, you're basically subtracting 3GB of RAM from your system.

zamalek• 1 year ago

I'm a Linux adherent, but I can't understand how a "normie tool" like this wouldn't release to Windows first. You're hitting <15% (<30% for US) of the market. Even if you only care about developers, you're hitting the worst of all 3 (Windows, Mac, Linux) with a MacOS only release[1].

[1] https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/

naniwaduni4• 1 year ago

In spite of the market share figures, Mac apps have had a disproportionate share of of devs and users willing to pay for long time.

Love the pie graph that that adds up to 153%, though.

mindfulhacker• 1 year ago

out of curiosity: how did you handle the trade-offs between model size and quality for grammar correction?

Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

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