I think the idea of these grammar checkers has a lot of value – I help edit a lot of my wife’s short fiction, for example, and looking for typos, “a” vs “an”, “the the” illusions, etc. is distracting and takes away my mental energy from the higher-level judgements like “cut this paragraph, it’s bloat” or “extend this description”. A tool should be doing those low-level checks! But all the tools suck…
It’s frustrating, because the tools for writing these sorts of checkers better exist! There’s wonderful HDPSG-based grammars like the English Resource Grammar[1]. There’s sometimes-problematic-but-often-great NN approaches for syntactically invalid text! Hell, there’s even simple shallow part of speech tagging so at least you don’t warn that “What was Ted doing?” is passive voice because of “was -ed”… But nope, 99% of these tools are broken piles of regexes for some reason.
Sure, no machine in the foreseeable future will be able to read your essay with context in mind, and writing blog posts with lint rules like “no personal pronouns” seems silly. But there’s no reason a linter should think “highlighting HOW hiring you will benefit them” contains an acronym, “personal touch” should be “personal tap”, or anything like that.
I feel like monospaced fonts are not optimized for long-form writing and reading. Monospace makes sense for code because of its structural characteristics/common need for alignment.
I am certain that this is a topic that is a matter of individual taste and preference rather than objective superiority.
i will also note that deciding that you need a proportional font severely limits your choice of editor, and if you don’t like those choices, word processors are the next step.
Ah I’m surprised because vale seems to come with a server, but I guess it’s not following the language server protocol… ? Compatibility with vscode seems mentioned though so it gets me wondering.
The way that most of the advice in the screenshots is bad advice kind of sums up my feelings about this class of tool, but the interface looks neat.
I think the idea of these grammar checkers has a lot of value – I help edit a lot of my wife’s short fiction, for example, and looking for typos, “a” vs “an”, “the the” illusions, etc. is distracting and takes away my mental energy from the higher-level judgements like “cut this paragraph, it’s bloat” or “extend this description”. A tool should be doing those low-level checks! But all the tools suck…
It’s frustrating, because the tools for writing these sorts of checkers better exist! There’s wonderful HDPSG-based grammars like the English Resource Grammar[1]. There’s sometimes-problematic-but-often-great NN approaches for syntactically invalid text! Hell, there’s even simple shallow part of speech tagging so at least you don’t warn that “What was Ted doing?” is passive voice because of “was -ed”… But nope, 99% of these tools are broken piles of regexes for some reason.
Sure, no machine in the foreseeable future will be able to read your essay with context in mind, and writing blog posts with lint rules like “no personal pronouns” seems silly. But there’s no reason a linter should think “highlighting HOW hiring you will benefit them” contains an acronym, “personal touch” should be “personal tap”, or anything like that.
Stop parsing natural languages with Regex!.
[1]: Or for simpler custom grammars, my library Treebender /shameless-plug
My favorite thing about that meme is that the answer right below it says that regex is the correct tool for the asker’s specific question.
Amazing! I had no clue of the existence of such an open source tool. And I also love it when a project lists similar projects.
I’ve learned a lot today. Thanks for this article.
Vim’s Ale plugin supports vale out of the box. All I had to do was install and configure vale to get prose linting.
Overall the linting so far has not been helpful.
I feel like monospaced fonts are not optimized for long-form writing and reading. Monospace makes sense for code because of its structural characteristics/common need for alignment.
I am certain that this is a topic that is a matter of individual taste and preference rather than objective superiority.
i will also note that deciding that you need a proportional font severely limits your choice of editor, and if you don’t like those choices, word processors are the next step.
I agree, it definitely depends on the person. There is periodically research into this topic https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-reading/
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/634067.634173 / http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102.8305&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I may be missing something obvious but why isn’t this integrated in the lspconfig repository instead of a dedicated null-ls.nvim plugin?
null-ls is a kind of “clever hack” that makes programs that aren’t language servers behave like language servers.
Ah I’m surprised because vale seems to come with a server, but I guess it’s not following the language server protocol… ? Compatibility with vscode seems mentioned though so it gets me wondering.