Nine Point Labs
The Word from Ninepoint Labs

Rune 0.8: From ODF experiment to a word processor you can install

· 3 min read

Yesterday’s Rune post was about a principle: ODF is home, DOCX is a guest. Since then Rune has gone from 0.2 to 0.8.4 in about two days, and it has stopped being an idea about formats and started being an app you can install and write a book in.

Install it like a real app

Every GitHub release now ships packages for Arch/Omarchy, Debian 13 and Fedora 42, with a desktop entry. The easiest path keeps it updated for you:

autonomix-cli add https://github.com/ninepointlabs/rune

The everyday editor filled in

  • A File menu with save-button states and autosave.
  • Font and text-color pickers, and a toolbar that fits any window: Table and alignment menus, with a ⋯ overflow for the rest.
  • A Table menu: insert rows and columns, delete a table.
  • A command palette on Ctrl+K.
  • Pages and margins: a real page view, Page setup, and paper size picked from your locale.
  • Headers and footers edited in place, with page number and page count fields that round-trip through both ODF and .docx.

Rune writes its own ODF now

Rune used to lean on Qt’s document writer, and it kept losing things: headings saved as bold text, nested tables lost content, a table after a list could vanish. Rune now writes the whole .odt itself: real Heading 1–6 styles, links, lists that keep their numbering across interruptions, and tables with widths, borders, merged cells and nesting. If ODF is the home format, Rune has to be a good citizen of it, and now it is one.

Tools for people writing long things

0.8.3 added author tooling:

  • Headings from the toolbar (Ctrl+Alt+0–3) and an outline sidebar with chapters, scenes and word counts. Drag a section to move it in one undo step.
  • Story notes saved inside the file.
  • Sources from a form, CSL-JSON or BibTeX, with citations (Ctrl+Shift+C) in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago author-date or IEEE, and a bibliography that keeps up with every edit.

Citations survive a trip through .docx. Word and LibreOffice see the text, and Rune finds the citations again when the file comes back.

AI edits that don’t wreck your paragraphs

The AI can read your notes and sources, cite with [@key], and add sources, which are marked unreviewed until you check them. 0.8.4 fixed a nasty one: models copied 80-column line wraps into their edits, and every wrap became a paragraph break. The context now goes out one paragraph per line, and slightly garbled quotes still match. The same edit came out clean in 15 of 15 live ChatGPT runs, where every run checked before had broken paragraphs.

See it first

The site now has screenshots, a narrated 1:47 demo recorded from the real app, and a seven-page how-to guide covering formatting, pages, the AI, writing a book, and citations. Under all of it are 487 automated checks.

ODF by default still holds. The difference now is that Rune gives you a real reason to choose it.