Re: Grammar checking in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The question is if those feelings about grammar checking still hold
> true.  I think one of the most popular free programs to do grammar
> checking is LanguageTool (https://languagetool.org).  I've quickly
> tested it and it detected some non-trivial grammar mistakes, in English
> and Spanish at least.  I didn't see false positives, which is a good
> thing in this kind of tools.  You can try the tool from its website
> without installing it on your computer.

IIUC (after looking at https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool)
this is structured as a grammar-checking server (written in Java) that
can run on a remote host and then client applications connect to it and
presumably send their text to it a bit like they'd do with an LSP
server, except the clients aren't expected to launch the server.

Sadly it's not packaged for Debian (see
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=403619 suggests for
the details).  I can't see any info about using it on Fedora either.
AFAICT the most popular way to install it is as a "snap" package, which
I consider to be a euphemism for a blob :-(

> Is there interest in having this feature in Emacs?  Perhaps as an ELPA
> package, if the technology is not mature enough to have it in Core?

I think it would be nice to provide a package for such grammar checking,
yes.  We should be careful not to encourage users to just connect to
someone else's LaguageTool server, since that would be SaaSS, but other
than that I see no reason not to have such a package in GNU ELPA.
I don't expect many users to have such a server, so it's probably not
widespread enough to justify having it in core, currently.


        Stefan