Writing and document design; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word, rebuilt in pure Rust.
A fast, open-source word processor with the Word workflow you already know: the ribbon, styles,
tables, track changes, references and mail merge. It reads and writes .docx, runs natively on
macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD, and in the browser via WebAssembly.
By the ArtCraft team.
The Open Studio Handbook, WordCraft's built-in sample: the ribbon, live Styles gallery, rulers and the Navigation pane.
Every screenshot below is WordCraft itself, rendered offscreen by its own UI test harness
(cargo run -p wordcraft-ui-egui --example ui_shot).
 Review. Track changes, comment balloons in the margin, accept and reject, spelling and grammar as you type. |
 References. Tables of contents, footnotes, citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE, index and captions. |
 Design. Themes, style sets, paragraph spacing, watermarks, page colour and borders. |
 Dark mode with formatting marks, and the Insert tab: tables, pictures, shapes, links, headers, footers, fields and symbols. |
 Layout. Drop caps, text wrapping around pictures and shapes, automatic hyphenation, line numbers and page borders. |
|
 File. Start from a template, open recent documents, edit properties, export to PDF and other formats. |
|
- Familiar. Word's ribbon tabs, groups, shortcuts and behaviour: Enter continues a list, Tab demotes it, Ctrl/⌘+B bolds the word under the caret, the Styles gallery previews styles live, F4 repeats, F7 checks spelling, F8 extends the selection.
- Your files. Opens and saves .docx (OOXML), and also .odt, .rtf, .html, .md, .tex (LaTeX), .txt; exports PDF with real, selectable text, links and bookmarks.
- Fast. Paragraph layout is cached, so typing in a 188-page document re-lays it out in about 1.4 ms; pages render on demand.
- Everywhere. One Rust codebase for macOS, Windows, Linux, BSD and the web. No Electron, no Tauri: native egui on the GPU.
- Built for agents. Every action is a command with an id. The same 389 commands drive the ribbon, keyboard shortcuts, the command search, a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server.
- Private. Spelling, grammar and everything else work offline.
- Open. MIT OR Apache-2.0. Clean-room: built from public specifications and observation, with every asset original or openly licensed.
| Platform | Download | Run |
|---|---|---|
| Windows x64 | wordcraft-x64.7z | Run installer → launch wordcraft-x64.7z |
| Linux x64 | wordcraft-Linux-x64.run | chmod +x → run installer |
| macOS Apple Silicon | wordcraft-macOS-arm64.dmg | Open DMG → drag to Applications |
| Area | Highlights |
|---|---|
| Writing | Fast typing with IME, smart quotes, AutoCorrect, list autoformat (* , 1. ), dashes; word, sentence, paragraph selection; drag-select; clipboard with formatting; undo/redo; find and replace with regex |
| Formatting | Fonts, sizes, bold/italic/underline styles, strike, sub/superscript, caps, highlight, colours, character spacing, Format Painter, Change Case, Clear Formatting |
| Paragraphs | Alignment, indents (draggable on the ruler), spacing, line spacing, tabs with leaders, borders, shading, keep with next, widow/orphan control |
| Styles | Built-in style set, live gallery, Styles pane, create/modify/update styles, style sets, themes |
| Lists | Bullets, numbering, multilevel, restart, set value, custom formats |
| Tables | Insert by grid, merge/split, styles with banded rows, borders, shading, header rows repeated across pages, rows that split across pages, sort, formulas, text ↔ table |
| Pages | Margins, orientation, size, columns, page/column/section breaks, headers and footers (first page, odd/even), page numbers, watermark, page borders, line numbers, vertical alignment, drop caps, automatic hyphenation |
| Objects | Pictures (resize, crop, recolour, brightness/contrast, transparency, background removal, picture styles, rotate), shapes, text boxes, floating position with text wrapping (square, top and bottom, behind or in front of text) |
| References | Table of contents, footnotes and endnotes, citations and bibliography (APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE), captions, table of figures, cross-references, index, table of authorities |
| Review | Spelling and grammar with suggestions, thesaurus, word count, comments in margin balloons or a pane, track changes, accept/reject, compare documents, restrict editing, accessibility checker, document inspector |
| Mailings | Mail merge from CSV, merge fields, address block, greeting line, rules, preview, finish to a document; envelopes and labels |
| View | Print layout, web layout, draft, read mode, focus, zoom, one/multiple pages, page width, Navigation pane, rulers, gridlines, dark mode; interface in English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, Português (Brasil), Español or Українська (follows the system language by default) |
| Files | .docx read/write (opens in Word), PDF export, .odt, .rtf, .html, .md, .tex, .txt import/export, page images |
WordCraft was designed to be driven by people and by AI agents.
claude mcp add wordcraft -- wordcraft-cli mcp # headless documents
wordcraft --control 7981 & # or drive the running app…
claude mcp add wordcraft-app -- wordcraft-cli mcp --connect 127.0.0.1:7981Tools include list_commands, execute, batch, type_text, select_text, inspect_document,
render_page, save_document, and, with a running app, screenshot, click and key. Agents
can check their work through inspect_document without screenshots. See docs/mcp.md
and the control protocol. Macros record any sequence of commands and
play it back (tools.recordMacro, tools.macros).
The desktop app writes its log records to standard error and to logs/wordcraft.log next to its
preferences: on Linux $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wordcraft/logs/ (by default ~/.config/wordcraft/logs/),
on macOS ~/Library/Application Support/WordCraft/logs/, on Windows %APPDATA%\WordCraft\logs\.
A start from a desktop menu or the Dock has no terminal, so this file is what to attach to a bug
report: unreadable parts of a .docx, pictures or fonts a PDF export had to leave out and panics the
command guard recovered from land there. Each launch moves the previous log to wordcraft.1.log
(and that one to wordcraft.2.log), so the log of a run that crashed survives the next start; a
log stops growing at 16 MiB. --version writes no file, and runs with WORDCRAFT_NO_PREFS (agents'
test runs) log to standard error only. Document text is never logged; a panic message leaves out
the text it quotes.
By default WordCraft's own crates log at info and everything else at warn. RUST_LOG replaces
that with env_logger-style directives, for example RUST_LOG=debug,
RUST_LOG=warn,wordcraft_docx=trace or RUST_LOG=info,wgpu_core=warn; a directive ending in *
covers every target starting with it (wordcraft*=debug). The logger is
apps/wordcraft/src/logging.rs.
| Layer | Crate | Job |
|---|---|---|
| L0 | wordcraft-geom |
units and measurements |
| L1 | wordcraft-doc, wordcraft-fonts, wordcraft-proof |
document model and editing; fonts and shaping; spelling, grammar, hyphenation |
| L2 | wordcraft-layout, wordcraft-docx, wordcraft-formats |
line breaking, pagination, tables, notes, hit testing; OOXML; ODT/RTF/HTML/Markdown/TXT |
| L3 | wordcraft-render, wordcraft-pdf |
rasteriser (vello_cpu); PDF (krilla) |
| L4 | wordcraft-engine |
session, undo, 389 commands, Word feature catalog |
| L5 | wordcraft-mcp |
MCP server |
| L6 | wordcraft-ui-egui |
the Word-style front end (swappable) |
| apps | wordcraft, wordcraft-cli, wordcraft-web |
desktop, command line, browser |
WordCraft covers 87% of Word's ribbon features with commands today; counting depth and fidelity, we estimate about 62% of real feature parity. An alpha for everyday writing is close: the remaining work is mostly testing against real-world .docx files, native printing and the first signed builds. Charts, SmartArt, the equation editor and the Draw tab come after.
WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Copyright (c) 2026 ArtCraft Team and the WordCraft contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE.