Guide June 2026 10 min read

How to Use Pinogrammer:
Complete Guide

Everything you need to get the most out of Pinogrammer — from installing the extension to using domain profiles, keyboard shortcuts, and writing in Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada.

1. Installing Pinogrammer

Pinogrammer is a Chrome extension. It installs in about 30 seconds and requires no account or sign-in. Once installed, it activates automatically on every tab you open — no manual activation per site.

  1. 1
    Visit the Chrome Web Store. Search for "Pinogrammer" or click Add to Chrome from the Pinogrammer page.
  2. 2
    Click "Add to Chrome" and confirm the permissions dialog. Pinogrammer requests access to read text fields on pages you visit — it needs this to attach grammar suggestions to input areas.
  3. 3
    Pin the extension to your toolbar (click the puzzle icon → pin). This makes the settings icon accessible in one click.
  4. 4
    Open any page with a text field — Gmail compose, Notion, Slack, LinkedIn — and start typing. Pinogrammer begins checking automatically after you pause for 650ms.
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Gemini Nano warm-up: On your first use, Chrome downloads the Gemini Nano model in the background (about 100MB). This is a one-time download managed by Chrome itself. Until it's ready, Pinogrammer uses the Chrome Translator API as a fallback.

2. How Grammar Checking Works

Pinogrammer attaches a MutationObserver to every page. It watches for input, textarea, and contenteditable elements — the three types of text fields used on virtually every site. When you pause typing for 650ms, it submits the text to Gemini Nano on your device.

The suggestion card

When an error is found, a small card appears just below the field. The card shows:

Accepting a suggestion replaces only the erroneous text — the rest of your paragraph is untouched. The card renders in a Shadow DOM so it's visually isolated from the host page and can't be accidentally clicked or break any form validation.

Language auto-detection

Pinogrammer detects your language automatically using two signals: Chrome's Language Detector API (for Western scripts) and Unicode block heuristics (for Indic and CJK scripts). If you're typing Tamil, it recognises the Tamil Unicode range immediately and routes to the Tamil-aware correction path. You don't need to set a language — switching scripts mid-message also works.

3. Smart Rewrites

Grammar fixing is only part of Pinogrammer. You can also rewrite selected text in five different registers:

Mode What it does Best for
Formal Increases professional register, removes slang and contractions Client emails, proposals, cover letters
Casual Makes formal text sound more conversational Slack messages, social posts, team updates
Concise Trims filler words and redundant phrases Executive summaries, cold emails, tweets
Expanded Adds supporting detail and transitions Reports, introductions, explanatory paragraphs
Academic Converts text to formal scholarly register Research papers, dissertations, abstracts

To use rewrites, select any text in a field and either click the rewrite pill in the suggestion card, or right-click and choose "Rewrite with Pinogrammer". The rewritten text replaces the selection in place. Hit ↺ to generate a fresh variant if you don't like the first attempt.

4. Domain Profiles

Domain profiles tell Pinogrammer what kind of writing you're doing. The profile changes which corrections are made and which are deliberately left alone.

Profile What it protects Switch when you're writing…
General Nothing locked — balanced corrections Emails, blog posts, social media, chat
Legal Latin terms, "hereinafter", "pursuant to", citations Contracts, court filings, legal correspondence
Academic Passive voice, hedging language, citation style Research papers, dissertations, abstracts
Medical ICD codes, drug names, clinical abbreviations Clinical notes, case reports, discharge summaries
Business Industry jargon and acronyms (ROI, KPI, etc.) Board updates, client proposals, memos
Creative Intentional fragments, stylistic choices, voice Fiction, copywriting, screenplays

Change the active profile by clicking the Pinogrammer toolbar icon and selecting a profile from the dropdown, or via the profile chip in the suggestion card header. The setting persists per device until you change it.

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Tip for professionals: If you work across multiple domains in a single day — say Legal correspondence in the morning and casual Slack in the afternoon — bookmark or pin the profiles you switch between most often. A future update will add per-site profile memory.

5. Keyboard Shortcuts

Pinogrammer is designed to stay out of your way. All actions can be performed without touching the mouse:

Trigger grammar check on focused field
⌘⇧G
Trigger grammar check (Windows/Linux)
Ctrl⇧G
Accept first suggestion
Tab
Dismiss / close suggestion card
Esc
Open context menu (rewrite, explain)
Right-click selection

Suggestions auto-appear 650ms after you stop typing — no shortcut needed for basic use. The ⌘⇧G shortcut is most useful when you want to force a re-check after editing a paragraph.

6. Privacy and the AI Pipeline

Pinogrammer's default mode sends nothing to any server. The correction pipeline on your machine runs as follows:

  1. Script detection: Unicode heuristics identify the language block (Tamil, Devanagari, Latin, etc.) locally.
  2. PII scan: A local pattern matcher redacts any obvious personal data (email addresses, phone numbers, national ID patterns) from the payload before it reaches any model.
  3. Gemini Nano inference: Chrome's on-device model processes the text. No network call occurs.
  4. Response rendered: The suggestion card is built from the local response.

Cloud fallback is opt-in and controlled entirely by you. If you add an OpenAI or Anthropic API key in Settings, Pinogrammer will use cloud models for complex rewrites when the on-device model is uncertain. The PII scrubber runs before any cloud call. You pay your own API costs — Pinogrammer never stores or proxies your API key.

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Password fields are always skipped. Pinogrammer checks the type attribute of every field before attaching. Any field with type="password" is silently excluded — it never receives a MutationObserver listener.

7. Where Pinogrammer Works

Pinogrammer works on any site with standard HTML text fields:

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Google Docs limitation: Google Docs renders content on an HTML canvas element rather than a standard text field. Pinogrammer cannot attach to canvas-rendered editors. A banner is shown when you open Docs to explain this. Use Pinogrammer to draft content in a standard editor first, then paste into Docs.

8. Tips and Best Practices

Match the profile to the field

The biggest quality improvement comes from choosing the right domain profile. A correction that's wrong for a legal contract may be exactly right for a Slack message. Take 5 seconds to set the profile when you switch contexts.

Use Concise for first drafts

After finishing a first draft, select the whole paragraph and run the Concise rewrite. This is the fastest way to cut filler. Pinogrammer removes hedge phrases ("I think that maybe"), double adverbs ("very significantly"), and unnecessary preambles ("In this essay I will…").

Indic languages: type in native script

If you're writing Tamil, Malayalam, or Hindi, type directly in the native script — not in transliteration (e.g., not "naan pogireen"). Pinogrammer corrects native-script text natively. If you're using a keyboard like Google Input Tools that produces native Unicode output, it will work perfectly.

Use Explain to learn

The Explain option in the suggestion card calls the model to describe why the correction was made. For language learners or non-native English writers, this is the fastest way to understand grammar patterns — not just fix individual sentences, but understand the rule.

9. Troubleshooting

Suggestion card doesn't appear. Check that the extension is enabled (toolbar icon should be green). Reload the page. On very busy pages (Salesforce, complex SPAs), the MutationObserver may take a moment to attach — wait 2–3 seconds after the page loads.

Gemini Nano not available. Gemini Nano requires Chrome 127+ and a device with at least 22GB of free storage. On eligible devices, it downloads automatically. On ineligible devices, Pinogrammer falls back to Chrome Translator + Transformers.js (M2M100 model, 170MB, opt-in download).

Tamil/Malayalam corrections look wrong. Make sure you're typing in native Unicode script, not transliteration. Transliterated text in Latin characters is treated as English. If the language badge in the card header doesn't show the expected language, you may need to use an IME that outputs Unicode codepoints directly.

Extension slowing down the page. Pinogrammer batches observations and debounces at 650ms. On very large text editors (20k+ characters), inference can take 300–600ms for complex rewrites. For simpler grammar checks, latency is typically under 50ms. You can also increase the debounce delay in Settings if needed.

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