What do you want to see in a Vale browser extension?

[jdkato]

With the recent release of Vale CLI v3.0, I'm now shifting my focus to bringing Vale (back¹) to the browser. My goal is to initially support Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge.

The plan is to use native messaging to allow the CLI to communicate with browser extensions.

Below is a rough outline of how I see this working.

Installation

The installation process will consist of two parts:

1. Running vale host-install <browser> to install and configure the native messaging host.
2. Installing the extension from your browser.

Usage

The extension will use the new global configuration file to control how it lints text on the web.

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Please feel free to share thoughts or ideas on how this should work. Notably, given the nature of Vale (e.g., no cloud configuration), it's not straightforward to map project-based configurations to the browser.

Footnotes

1. As mentioned in https://github.com/errata-ai/vale/discussions/608, Vale Server (a now-deprecated desktop app) used to have a Chrome extension. ↩

[hamirmahal]

It'd be fantastic if

1. linting could happen client-side for lower latency, as opposed to making a round trip to an external server, and
2. users are able to run the linter on any arbitrary text input field in a browser.

[jdkato]

Both of these are already the case.

[lexipenia]

@jdkato Hey — Have you been able to make any progress on this? I think it could be very useful.

Possibly naive question: What's the motivation behind using native messaging? How feasibly would it be to use WASM within the extension for running Vale instead? I presume the former is easier to implement—but is out of reach for non-technical users.

[jdkato]

I've been busy lately, but it's still on my TODO list.

WASM would indeed make some things easier, but has you suspected, it's not so straightforward. It would require some architectural changes in both the CLI (building without cgo) and the client (handling the configuration).

[ChrisChinchilla]

I have been doing some research into other "desktop" language checkers and had a few tips on how you would make one on macOS at least. This idea doesn't replace a browser extension, as often they still need one anyway for Safari, Chromium, and others… But, it would be good to make these integrate if an when the two options exist… I have finally started a prototype macOS app…