Welcome to φ
φ is a writing app for the long haul — manuscripts, poetry, essays, and the notes that feed them. It is built first for the craft of writing: a calm, full-bleed page, a serif you can live in, and structure that stays out of your way until you reach for it.
You're using early software. The core — writing, organizing, versioning, and keeping your work safe in plain files — is solid and in daily use. But expect rough edges, occasional bugs, and features that are still settling.
The weakest area today is export — turning your work into EPUB, PDF, or Word files. It's under active development and the part most likely to need cleanup in the target app. Treat exported files as drafts and proofread them. See Exporting & printing for what to expect.
Your writing itself is never at risk: documents are plain files, saved continuously and verified, with version history you can roll back.
What makes φ different
Your writing is yours. Everything lives in plain files on your own Mac, in a folder you choose. There is no account, no cloud, and no network required to write, edit, search, or export. Close the app, open the folder, and your work is right there.
Local-first, durable by design. Every document is saved automatically and verified after each write. φ keeps a version history so you can step back to any earlier draft, and it can back that history up to your own git remote if you want it off-machine — but nothing leaves your computer unless you set that up.
One tool, two modes. φ is a manuscript editor first and a note-taking app
second, and the two share the same foundation. Write a book in Collections,
keep a daily journal, link ideas with [[wiki-links]], and watch them connect in
the graph — all in one place, one vault.
Quiet by default. Focus mode hides every piece of chrome. Typewriter scrolling keeps your line centered. The interface gets out of the way so the page is the thing.
What φ is not
- Not a cloud service. There are no servers and no sync accounts. Backup and portability are file- and git-based, under your control.
- Not a real-time collaboration tool. φ is a single-writer app by design.
- Not Markdown-native. Documents are stored as structured content (ProseMirror JSON) so rich elements — annotations, footnotes, citations, custom blocks — survive round-trips. You can still import and export Markdown freely.
How writing is stored
Each document is a .poiesis file: a small JSON wrapper around your text and its
metadata. A vault is just a folder of these files (plus an assets/ folder
for images and a version history). Because it's all plain files in a normal
folder, your writing is easy to back up, move, and keep for decades.
Where to go next
New here? Start with Getting started — you'll install φ, create your first vault, and write your first page in a few minutes.