Grammar and spell checking

This guide shows you how to turn on spelling and grammar checking, read what Harper reports, and fix what it finds. Typeward checks your writing with Harper, an English checker compiled into the app, so the text it checks never leaves your machine. The checker is off until you turn it on, and compiling, preview, and navigation do not depend on it.

For an AI rewrite of a whole selection instead of one issue at a time, see AI assistant.

Turn on the checker

Two switches control Harper, and both write the same setting. Turning on either one turns on the other.

In the Editing card of Settings → Editor, turn on Spell & grammar check. Its hint reads Powered by Harper. Configure it under Settings → Integrations → Grammar.
In Settings → Integrations → Grammar, turn on the switch on the Harper row. The row’s status chip reads Ready while the checker is on and Not configured while it is off.

While both switches are off, no grammar UI appears anywhere in the app and the engine never runs. Turning it on installs nothing, starts no background service, and starts no language server.

Harper is a vendored copy of harper-core, an Apache-2.0 licensed Rust crate. Typeward compiles it into its own binary and runs it in the same process as the rest of the app. There is no grammar service, no cloud API, and no request of any kind, so checking behaves identically with the machine offline.

The Grammar card holds the remaining options: the dialect, the personal dictionary, and the ignored suggestions. They appear under the Harper row once the switch is on.

Know what Harper checks

Harper reads your prose, never your markup. A format-aware parser masks LaTeX commands and Typst code, so Harper never flags them as bad English. Typeward picks that parser from the file extension.

File	Parser
`.tex`, `.bib`	LaTeX
`.typ`	Typst
`.md`	Markdown
Anything else that opens in the source pane	Plain text

Harper runs a pass about 400 ms after you stop typing, so results keep up without churning mid-word. It checks only the file open in the source pane. Typeward never scans the whole project, and Harper reports nothing for a file you have never opened.

Set the English dialect

Harper checks English only. In Settings → Integrations → Grammar, set English dialect to one of five varieties. The default is American (en-US).

American (en-US)
British (en-GB)
Canadian (en-CA)
Australian (en-AU)
Indian (en-IN)

The hint reads Spelling and usage rules follow the selected variety. The dialect applies app-wide, never per project and never per file.

Read the results

Issues surface in three places:

Source pane. Harper underlines each issue where it occurs, in the color and line style of its family.
Status bar. While the checker is on and issues exist, an indicator shows the count, for example 3 problems. Its tooltip reads Show grammar problems, and selecting it opens the Grammar tab of the logs panel.
Grammar tab. The logs panel has five tabs: All logs, Errors, Warnings, Info, and Grammar. The Grammar tab lists every collected issue as a card, and it reads No grammar issues when it has nothing to report.

The Grammar tab collects results from every file you have opened with the checker on, so it works as a cross-file list. The list clears when you switch the checker off or open a different project.

Every issue belongs to one of four families. The line style repeats the information the color carries, so the families stay distinguishable without relying on hue.

Family	Color	Underline	Covers
Spelling	Red	Wavy	Misspellings, typos, malapropisms
Grammar	Amber	Double	Agreement, punctuation, capitalization, word boundaries
Style	Green	Dashed	Advisory polish: redundancy, repetition, readability
Miscellaneous	Blue	Dotted	Word choice, usage, regionalisms

Typeward reports spelling and grammar issues as warnings, and style and miscellaneous ones as advisory info. Anything Harper reports that does not match a known kind falls into Miscellaneous.

Harper’s underlines are separate from the ones your language server produces. See Autocomplete, snippets, and formatting.

Fix an issue

Hover over an underline to open its tooltip. The tooltip shows a chip with the issue kind, for example Spelling or Word Choice, then the message, then the actions.

Action	Offered on	What it does
A replacement button, up to three	Every issue	Replaces the underlined text with the text on the button
Add to dictionary	Issues whose kind chip reads Spelling	Adds the underlined word to your personal dictionary, and Harper stops flagging that word anywhere
Ignore	Every issue	Dismisses that exact suggestion everywhere it recurs

Ignore keys the dismissal to the text and its context rather than to a position, so it survives edits, files, and restarts.

The cards in the Grammar tab carry the same actions plus Open file. Select a card to jump to the issue in the source pane. The header of the tab shows the total and a chip per family with its count. Select a chip to filter the list to that family, and select it again to remove the filter.

Replacements and Add to dictionary act on the live text, so they work only for the file open in the source pane. On a card for another file they are disabled, with the hint Open this file to apply. Ignore is app-wide and always available.

Manage the dictionary and ignored suggestions

Both lists live under Settings → Integrations → Grammar and apply app-wide, never per project.

The dictionary row counts the words you added, for example Personal dictionary: 12 words. Its hint notes that words you added with Add to dictionary are never flagged. Select Manage to open the list, where each word has its own remove button and the empty state reads No custom words yet. Each entry is a single word of at most 64 characters.

Under Ignored suggestions, select Reset ignored lints to restore every suggestion you dismissed with Ignore. Typeward confirms with the toast Ignored lints cleared.

Typeward writes both lists to its app data folder: the dictionary to grammar/dictionary.txt, one word per line, and the ignored set to grammar/ignored.json. The dictionary is plain text you can inspect, back up, or edit while the app is closed. See Data locations, credentials, and uninstall.

Choose between Harper and the AI action

With the AI assistant turned on, Typeward also offers a Fix grammar & style action for a selection. It is a different tool, not a better one.

Harper is deterministic and local. It flags one issue at a time, you accept fixes individually, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Fix grammar & style sends the selected text to the AI provider you configured, using your own API key. It proposes a rewrite you review before anything changes in the file.

The two are independent. Harper works with the AI assistant off, and Fix grammar & style works with the checker off. Neither one replaces the other.

Check that it worked

You should now see three signs that Harper is running:

The Harper row in Settings → Integrations → Grammar shows the status chip Ready.
Colored underlines appear in the source pane about 400 ms after you stop typing.
The status bar shows a count, for example 3 problems, while the open file has issues.

If it does not work

If no underlines appear, work down this ladder:

Confirm that the Harper row shows Ready rather than Not configured.
Confirm that the text you expect Harper to flag sits in the file open in the source pane, because Harper checks no other file.
Confirm that the text is prose, because the format-aware parser masks LaTeX commands and Typst code.
Confirm that the text is English, because Harper checks no other language.
Confirm that you never dismissed the suggestion with Ignore, which suppresses it everywhere until you select Reset ignored lints.
Confirm that the word is absent from your personal dictionary, because Harper stops flagging every word you add to it.