This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We are covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. The other utilities in this series are listed here.
LanguageTool is an open source proofreading software for English, French, German, Polish, Russian, and many other languages although some are not actively maintained.
What makes this software special? LanguageTool offers a variety of different ways to access its functionality. There’s a cross-platform Java desktop application for offline use. You can also use its grammar, style and spell checker in a web browser with both Firefox and Chrome add-ons. There’s also support for LanguageTool in Google Docs, LibreOffice, and community support has added other applications including Emacs, LyX, and vim.
And there’s even an add-on for Microsoft Word if you still live on the dark side. Or use the software from the project’s website.
LanguageTool comes with its own embedded HTTP/HTTPS server so you can send a text to LanguageTool via HTTP and get the detected errors back as JSON.
Installation
LanguageTool can be downloaded for offline use. The current version is a 162MB zipped file. It needs Java 8 or later installed on your system.
Extract the zipped file, and fire up the tool with the command:
$ java -jar languagetool.jar
As this is open source software, you can build the source code if you want. The developers provide instructions, so we won’t repeat them here.
Installing the extensions and plug-ins is straightforward. We didn’t experience any issues.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |