ῥῆμα

The poem is a
first-class object.

Rhema is a distraction-free word processor for poetry — manuscripts that look like books while you write them, and poems that look like poems: line by line, the way you typed them. It is free and open source (MIT), runs on your machine, saves plain files, and asks for no accounts.

Download 1.5.9 Fourteen short guides

A Greek poem in Rhema's manuscript view — lines kept exactly as typed
A Kavafis poem in Rhema — every line where you left it.

What a poet gets

A poem mark drawn at the end of a poem
Enter is the rhythm. One Enter: a new line. Two: a stanza. Three: a new poem. Line surgery — move, duplicate, join, split — with full undo.
Outline cards for a poetry collection
Outline cards per poem: title, first line, line count, status — draft, fair copy, finished — and a progress chip for the whole collection.
The Scraps drawer holding cut lines
Scraps & Darlings. Cut a line you love-but-can't-keep; it waits, tagged with its origin poem, for a better home. Nothing is ever really lost.
Then and Now snapshots side by side
Then / Now compare. Daily and manual snapshots side by side, with added words marked — watch a poem grow.
The book-languages picker
Bilingual by birth. Fourteen interface languages, Greek first-class; each book declares its own languages, and spellcheck honours all of them.
A poem colophon in the light theme
In and out. Import txt, md, docx, PDF — one file becomes a collection. Export EPUB, a 5×8 chapbook PDF, or plain text, colophon included.

The reader's eye — local, and never in your text

Point Rhema at a local OpenAI-compatible model and it reads your poem, filing three to five concrete observations in the notes pane — in the poem's own language. It never writes into the poem. Ever. With no endpoint configured, the app simply never offers AI.

Rhema is alpha-quality software, shared as-is with no liability — the MIT license already disclaims all warranty, and we mean it plainly: this is built for one working poet first and tested on her books, not hardened for the world. Expect rough edges. Your words are always recoverable inside Rhema (Darlings, trash, snapshots), but keep your own backups of your library folder regardless. Bug reports are welcome — they're how alpha becomes stable.

Start writing tonight

Free and open source — MIT, every line readable in the repository. Binaries for every OS on the Releases page.

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