About Rhema

What Rhema is

Rhema (ῥῆμα, rhêma — “the word”) is a distraction-free word processor for authors. It understands from the moment you install it that you are writing books and nothing else. No bloat, no distractions, with manuscripts that look like books as you write them — and poems that look like poems: line by line, the way you typed them.

Rhema is a new project based on Hugh Howey’s NEO (MIT), which it keeps whole — every novel, screenplay, KDP and export feature works untouched — and grows a first-class poetry format on top.

It runs locally. Works in progress are saved in plain files on your disk. No accounts, no subscriptions. AI, when you use it, runs on your own machine: point Rhema at a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint and, when the addresses point to this computer, nothing leaves it.

What Rhema is not

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.

It is not a cloud app, not a social network, not a writing prompt machine. It is a desk with a good lamp.

Who makes Rhema

Rhema is a product of OnlyASCII Ltd — Panos Xynos’s platform engineering company in England & Wales. The same workshop that keeps other people’s infrastructure alive builds writing tools for one working writer at a time; Rhema is its keeper’s tool, opened under MIT.

License & credits

MIT — Hugh Howey’s license, kept whole, with a notice for Rhema’s own portions: Portions © 2026 Panagiotis Xynos. Free to use, free to modify, free to share.

Rhema exists because Hugh Howey built NEO and opened it under MIT; his LICENSE, attribution and philosophy travel with it. Upstream NEO fixes are cherry-picked in when they matter. Hugh’s fair warning stands: writing apps die of bloat, and the bar for anything new is “does this help a working writer write, finish, and publish?”

The typefaces on this site — GFS Didot, Alegreya, Jost — are licensed under the SIL Open Font License; their license files ship with the source repository.

Privacy

This website sets no cookies, loads no analytics, and requests nothing from third parties: every font and image is served from this site itself. The application makes no automatic network calls either — your manuscripts never leave your machine unless you take them there yourself: the downloads you click, and the AI features, which talk only to the local endpoints you configure (with no endpoint set, the app never offers AI).