Installing fasttext

fasttext is “an open-source, free, lightweight library that allows users to learn text representations and text classifiers”, and is used by languagetool to help in language identification.

Installation of fasttext using homebrew is either not possible or deprecated, but it's easy to compile from source.

• create a subdirectory to work in and cd into it
• download fasttext git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText.git
• cd into the newly created ./fasttext subdirectory
• type make and it will compile to generate a new binary called — unsurprisingly — fasttext
• move the binary file to somewhere convenient in your path, such as /usr/local/bin(you might need to be sudo for this) and check it can be found by typing which fasttext … this will return something like /usr/local/bin/fasttext

It's as simple as that.

#languagetool