Re: Grammar checking in Emacs

[Alexandre Garreau]

Le lundi 15 novembre 2021, 03:46:19 CET Stefan Monnier a écrit :
> > 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 :-(

a very heavy and hype 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.

I wonder if the increasing tendency to write software extensions as 
servers instead of libraries is calculated not only to promote SaaSS and 
dependency, but even to promote a way of interfacing software that allows 
circumventing copyleft…