Built for the craft.Bring forth the work.
Verse, scene breaks, epigraphs, pull-quotes. Word goals per chapter, a graph of your story. The tools writers actually need — not a note app you have to bend into shape.
Windows is unsigned for now — on the SmartScreen prompt, choose “More info → Run anyway”.
Stop bending note apps into books.
A note app can hold your words. A manuscript asks for more — structure, goals, and blocks made for prose. That gap is exactly what φ fills.
Note-app cosplay
Plugins, hacks, and folders pretending to be chapters.
A writing app, for real
Verse, scene breaks, epigraphs, and pull-quotes are first-class — and Collections give a book its parts and chapters.
Undo-and-pray
One stray edit from losing a paragraph you loved, with Ctrl+Z as the only safety net.
Every draft, kept
Automatic checkpoints and named snapshots — see what changed and restore any version with a click.
Scattered everywhere
Draft in one app, research in another, notes in a third — and none of them talking.
One calm home
Manuscript, notes, and research together as plain files you own — linked, searchable, and offline.
Everything a long-form writer needs
Focus mode
A clean page and nothing else — focus mode hides every panel, typewriter scrolling keeps your current line centered, and reading mode lets you settle in.
from the window without quite seeing it.
Below, the town was beginning to wake —
shutters, a cart, the first thin smoke.
She set the cup down and began to write.
There was, she thought, no other way.
Long-form structure
Organize a manuscript into collections — books, parts, chapters — with per-chapter word goals, an outline, and quick previous/next navigation.
The Lighthouse
Novel · 12 chapters
- Chapter 1 · The arrival3,180
- Chapter 2 · The light2,940
Version history
A built-in history of your work, with automatic checkpoints and named snapshots. See what changed and restore any earlier draft with a click.
Today
- Auto-checkpointCheckpoint9:01 PM · Local
- Auto-checkpointCheckpoint8:56 PM · Local
Links & graph
Connect notes with [[wiki-links]], follow backlinks both ways, and see the whole shape of a project in an interactive graph.
Annotations
Mark up drafts with colored highlights, margin notes, and comment-only annotations — then search and filter them when you revise.
The sea had been grey since morning, and she watched it from the window.
“grey since morning”
Set the mood early — return to this.
Research sheets
Keep research pages beside your manuscript, linked to the documents, books, and characters they belong to.
On Stoic resolve
Morning pages
A dedicated home for morning pages — the daily longhand habit from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way — to clear your head and start the day already writing.
Woke before the alarm again. The light was
318 / 750 words
Export anywhere
Your words are never trapped — export to Markdown, HTML, or plain text anytime, and import whole Markdown vaults you already keep.
Export “The Lighthouse”
- Markdown.md
- HTML.html
- Plain text.txt
Why I’m building φ
One home for the writing — and the thinking around it.
φ started as something simple: I wanted one place to keep my writing — and to manage the notes around it. A writing app and a note-taking app in one, so my drafts and the thinking behind them live together.
I added morning pages because the daily practice — three longhand pages, first thing — has stuck with me since I found it in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. φ makes room for that ritual alongside the work it feeds.
I’ve been writing for over two decades. φ is my attempt to build the tool I always wanted, and to help other writers in my own way. I use it for my own work every day — and the poetry that comes of it I publish on Raven Shelf, my home as a writer. φ is the desk where a piece is made; Raven Shelf is where it goes once it’s ready. Building the tool and writing with it, side by side, is what keeps φ honest.
On the name
Its name is poiesis — from the Greek ποίησις, “making” or “production”: the act of bringing something new into being. It’s the root of the word poetry, and it’s what writing is — giving life to stories, thoughts, essays, poems, and many more things. The mark is φ, used in philosophy as a shorthand for a generic act or doing. Together they stand for one thing: the creative work of intentional making.
— Adro, who makes φ
It’s an alpha — and your words are safe anyway
φ is in public alpha. Expect rough edges and the occasional bug — but never a lost manuscript.
Honest pre-release
Things will change and sometimes break. We ship fast and fix in the open, with automatic updates as the alpha matures toward stable.
Your words can’t be trapped
Everything lives in plain files in a folder you own, with built-in version history. Export to Markdown, HTML, or text anytime.
No account, no cloud
φ runs on your machine. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is locked behind a login — alpha or not.
Start writing in φ
φ’s public alpha is out now for macOS, Windows, and Linux — download it and start writing today.