ArtCraft released open-source clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Rust

A buyer who wants to leave Microsoft 365 has three new apps to try, written in Rust and free to download. Brandon Thomas, the solo developer behind the open-source Adobe suite ArtCraft, published WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft on GitHub, as clean-room rewrites of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Tom's Hardware reported the release in a story by Jhet Borja.

All three repositories live under the storytold organisation and were created four days before the Tom's Hardware story. Read from the GitHub API: WordCraft has 5,676 stars, GridCraft has 2,818, and DeckCraft has 1,974. Each project is licensed Apache 2.0.

The pitch is one engineer, three platforms, no subscription

Thomas's framing in Tom's Hardware is that Microsoft 365 and Adobe both ship as subscriptions that users cannot opt out of once a workflow depends on them. His response is to rewrite the apps in Rust so the same binary runs on macOS, Windows and Linux with no compatibility layer. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides already cover the free side, but only in a browser, and Thomas argues the online-only model gives up local ownership of the files.

Tom's Hardware also notes that Thomas has fifteen years of software engineering experience before this project, which is relevant because the "vibecoded" criticism of ArtCraft had centred on whether the code was written by someone who could not maintain it. Thomas said on X that he does know how to code.

The three apps are early software

The Tom's Hardware story says the Office clones are "still far from what they intend to replace", in Jhet Borja's own words. The repositories carry no shipped-feature parity list and no release downloads, so a reader thinking about replacing an Office install should treat these as early software and test on a copy of a real document rather than a live one. The licence is Apache 2.0, which allows commercial use and modification.

What the collection now contains

With the Office trio, ArtCraft spans a document editor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a photo editor (PhotoCraft), a vector tool (VectorCraft), a motion compositor (EffectCraft), a page-layout editor (DesignCraft), an audio station (SoundCraft), a CAD app (CADCraft) and more. The suite is written and maintained by one person. The Discord community has asked for a stronger CADCraft target to replace AutoCAD and Fusion, which Tom's Hardware reports Thomas is considering next.

Source

• GridCraft (Excel): github.com/storytold/gridcraft
• WordCraft (Word): github.com/storytold/wordcraft
• DeckCraft (PowerPoint): github.com/storytold/deckcraft
• Reporting: Tom's Hardware, Jhet Borja