Grammar Checking for email

I’m a pretty avid aerc user. If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit you probably seen how I got my personal email & school emails working in aerc.

Early on into this journey I noticed that I was making quite a few typos and grammatical mistakes when switching over to terminal based email. Where email is the professional communications tool this is simply unacceptable. As a workaround I started writing my emails in markdown to quickly get the amazing grammar checking from Harper, an amazing grammar checker written by a good friend of mine, Elijah Potter. While writing the emails in a markdown file and then copy and pasting them into the aerc composer worked, it was kinda annoying.

My solution for getting world class checking while drafting was quite simple.

1. Ensure neovim is my document editor for email
2. Ensure Harper is running on .eml or mail type files

Part One: Neovim as a Draft Writer

This part is was probably easiest part. Just slap a bit of $EDITOR defaults with neovim, problem solved.

export VISUAL="nvim"
export EDITOR="nvim"

Now whenever aerc opens the drafting interface it simply shells out to $EDITOR and we have neovim instance running with a draft of our email. I also believe this should also work for any other email client that has similar composer behavior like mutt, neomutt, alpine etc.

Part Two: Grammar Checking

Now comes the “harder” part, ensuring email gets checked. First make sure harper-ls is installed on your system. You can do this by installing via mason.nvim or installing directly cargo install --git https://github.com/elijah-potter/harper harper-ls.

I put in a PR (#93) which allows for checking with email files. Granted the implementation is a bit naïve, but it works well enough. To use the functionality you simply just need to make sure that neovim knows that harper can work with mail filetypes.

lspconfig.harper_ls.setup{
    filetypes = {
        'mail',
        ...other languages can go here
    },
}

Now just enjoy blazing fast local grammar checking on your email!

PS You can easily test if it works by opening neovim with a .eml file (nvim test.eml) and run :LspInfo and check if harper-ls is running.