Sunsetting Rune, and why I'm writing in WordCraft now

Earlier this month I started building Rune, a word processor for Linux and Omarchy with AI built right into the writing surface. Today I’m archiving it, and I’d like to tell you why.

Why I built Rune

Word processors on Linux felt like a choice between heavyweight ports and plain text editors pretending to be word processors. And every one of them treated AI as a sidebar plugin. I wanted the opposite: a fast, native app where the model is part of the page, where you can ask it to fix a paragraph and the fix lands right in your document as one undo step.

Rune got further than I expected. It went from an idea to version 0.8.7 in about two weeks, with packages for Arch, Debian and Fedora, an AppImage for most other distros, headers and footers, tables, and sign-in for ChatGPT and OpenRouter.

What I learned

Quite a lot, honestly. Rune started on LibreOfficeKit and ended up as a single Qt process that reads and writes ODF itself, because the first design had a performance ceiling I couldn’t get past. Along the way I learned to test real files instead of trusting documentation. That habit caught a bug in Qt’s own ODF writer, where a table right after a list silently disappeared when LibreOffice opened the file. By the end, Rune was checked by 504 automated tests. I’ll carry that way of working into everything I build next.

Then I found WordCraft

Recently I came across WordCraft, a fast, open-source word processor written in Rust by the ArtCraft team. I tried it, and it’s really good.

It does what Rune set out to do, and more. It has a ribbon and styles, works with .docx natively along with .odt, Markdown and more, exports PDF, and has track changes and comments, offline spelling and grammar, footnotes, a table of contents, and citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE. It runs on Linux as a Flatpak, plus macOS, Windows, FreeBSD and the web.

The part that really got me is how it treats AI. Its commands are available through a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so AI assistants can work inside your documents. That’s the idea I was chasing with Rune, done in a more open way: you bring whichever assistant you like.

It’s still in development, but it’s already well past where Rune is.

Why archive instead of compete

I could keep going. But I’m one person, word processors are a lot of work to maintain, and the world doesn’t need two small open-source editors chasing the same idea when one of them is already further along. I’d rather spend my time on things only Nine Point Labs can build, and send you to the better tool.

So Rune is archived. The code stays up under the MIT license, along with the existing releases, if you’d like to learn from it or fork it. The README now points to WordCraft.

Give WordCraft a try

If you write on Linux, or anywhere really, please give WordCraft a try. The source is on GitHub if you’d like to dig in or help out.

Thank you to everyone who tried Rune or sent a kind word about it. It meant a lot.