Ghostwriter

A terminal UI for writing poems and prose, morphing their meaning through word-embedding vector arithmetic, and rendering them as ghosted PDFs for the Sony DPT-RP1 e-ink reader.

The "ghosting" visual effect — overlapping, slightly jittered text layers — mirrors the semantic drift of the morphed words.

Quickstart

pip install -e .

# Terminal UI (desktop)
ghostwriter

# Web UI (works from your phone too)
ghostwriter-web

On first launch the app downloads GloVe word vectors (~128 MB, cached locally).

The web UI runs at http://localhost:5000 and prints your local IP so you can open it from your phone on the same WiFi.

How it works

1. Write a poem or paste one into the editor.
2. Enter a vibe — a single word like dread, warmth, alien.
3. Tag words — place cursor on a word and press F2 to tag it for morphing. Repeat for as many words as you like.
4. Cycle — press F5. Tagged words begin cycling through replacement candidates live in the editor.
5. Lock — press F7 on a cycling word to freeze it at the current replacement, or F6 to freeze all words at once.
6. Share — press F9 to save a web view to poems/ with a unique ID and open it in your browser. Morphed words show their originals as ghosts on hover. Each page has Open Graph tags for rich iOS Messages / social previews.
7. Render a ghosted PDF (F3) and push it to your DPT-RP1 (F4).

Web UI (phone-friendly)

Run ghostwriter-web and open the URL on your phone. The flow:

1. Write or paste a poem, enter a vibe word.
2. Tag — tap words to mark them for morphing.
3. Morph — see candidates, tap morphed words to pick alternatives.
4. Save & share — get a unique URL with OG tags for iOS Messages previews.
5. Gallery — browse all saved poems at /poems.

Replacements are drop-in: they match the original word's part of speech and tense/inflection, ranked by proximity to the vibe direction.

Key bindings

Key	Action
F2	Tag / untag word under cursor (works mid-cycle too)
F5	Start cycling tagged words
Escape	Stop cycling (freeze all at current candidates)
F6	Freeze all cycling words
F7	Lock individual word under cursor
F8	Toggle yellow highlight on cycling words
F9	Share — save to poems/ + open web view
F3	Render ghosted PDF
F4	Push PDF to DPT-RP1
Ctrl+S	Save poem
Ctrl+O	Load poem
Ctrl+Q	Quit

Dependencies

Package	Role
Textual	Terminal UI
gensim	Word embeddings (GloVe)
reportlab	PDF generation
dpt-rp1-py	Sony DPT-RP1 integration
nltk	Part-of-speech tagging + WordNet thesaurus
lemminflect	Inflection matching
Flask	Web UI server

Deploying to Fly.io

Host the web UI at a custom domain (e.g. ghostwriter.humble.audio).

# 1. Install flyctl — https://fly.io/docs/flyctl/install/
brew install flyctl
fly auth login

# 2. Launch the app (keep the existing fly.toml)
fly launch --copy-config

# 3. Create a persistent volume for poems + model cache
fly volumes create ghostwriter_data --region sjc --size 1

# 4. Set an API key (protects morph + save endpoints)
fly secrets set GHOSTWRITER_API_KEY="$(openssl rand -hex 16)"

# 5. Deploy
fly deploy

# 6. Custom domain
fly certs add ghostwriter.humble.audio
# Then add a CNAME in your DNS:
#   ghostwriter.humble.audio -> <app-name>.fly.dev

The GloVe model (~128 MB) downloads on first request and is cached on the persistent volume. Subsequent cold starts load from disk (~10 s).

Machines auto-stop when idle and wake on the next request.

License

MIT