WordCraft rebuilds Microsoft Word in pure Rust, no Electron required
An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust
WordCraft is an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word written entirely in Rust. It reproduces the familiar ribbon, styles, track changes, references and mail merge, reads and writes .docx, and runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD as well as in the browser via WebAssembly. One codebase drives 422 commands, exposed to AI agents through an MCP server, and paragraph layout is cached so typing in a 188-page document re-lays it out in about 1.4 ms.
WordCraft was designed to be driven by people and by AI agents.
- lr0
Has anyone of the people spamming these apps by storytold on HN actually tried any of them? I know that any new software can have bugs, but the ones here are really not acceptable for a release, let alone labeling it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone who might have used any of the originals, or at least can assess basic software qualities. I have tried some of them and really everything is buggy, a lot of options and buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the clones of Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as of writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy than my experience with photocraft, changing a text to a headline made it just crash on my M4 MacBook, after making it VERY slow and unresponsive for 3 minutes.
It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with.
I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like […]
- anilgulecha
Storytold apps are a gift, and are setting the precedent for AI apps. Everyone was wondering about the relevance of open source in post AI era, and here we have it: a magnitude more ambitious ecosystem.
While Bun proved at-scale rewrite, these are proving huge at-scale re-dos of the entire software ecosystem.
I suspect 24 months from now the landscape of daily software is going to be vastly changed.
- umvi
These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.
- pulkitbanta
Why not use LibreOffice which is already open source? I'm just trying to understand what we are solving here and why do we need a 1:1 of some other tool while existing tools which are much refined already exist?
- cobychapple
I see that in addition to the Adobe suite apps last week, they've also now done implementations of excel/spreadsheet (https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft), powerpoint/presentation (https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft), and also AutoCAD/3D modeling (https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft) as well.
What a time to be alive.