The developer Brandon Thomas has expanded its offensive against payment software with three free alternatives to Microsoft Office. After presenting their clones of the applications Adobenow offers WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft to write documents, work with spreadsheets and create presentations, respectively.
The origin of this initiative is in its anger with the penalties that Adobe had charged him for canceling subscriptionsas explained by Thomas himself on the Hacker News forum. His response was to create free and open source programs that users could preserve and modify, a proposal that he now extends to office automation.
The alternative to words receives the name of WordCraft and plays your well-known top tool tape. According to its documentation, it incorporates styles, tables, track changes, comments, spelling and grammar checking and automatic creation of custom letters and documents, in addition to opening and saving DOCX files, supporting ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown and plain text and exporting to PDF.
For those who need to work with spreadsheets, GridCraft offers an alternative to Excel with more than 500 functions, dynamic arrays, conditional formatting, graphs and pivot tables. It uses XLSX as its native format and supports CSV and TSV, as well as importing old XLS files, although in the latter you can still lose formatting elements and embedded objects.
The third application is called DeckCraft and allows you to create presentations with themes, slide designs, images, shapes, tables and graphs. The substitute for PowerPoint It also incorporates transitions, animations and a presenter view with notes, allows you to open and save PPTX files and offers export to PDF and images.
All three programs have versions for Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSDin addition to web versions through WebAssemblya technology that allows them to be executed in the browser, requiring the user to download them and host them on a web server. Its downloads and code are available at GitHubwhile the project website offers a common installer to manage them and keep them updated.
Thomas has used Claudethe artificial intelligence of Anthropicto generate the code of these programs in the language rust. Repositories describe them as implementations of ‘clean room’developments that seek to reproduce the functions of the original applications through own codeand maintain familiar interfaces to facilitate change.
At the moment, this approach to Office is not as complete as the one made to the suite Creative Cloud from Adobe. In recent weeks, Thomas has released PhotoCraft to replace photoshop, VectorCraft to do it with Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere, LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, DesignCraft for InDesign and PDFCraft for Acrobat Pro. Both this collection and the new office tools are still under development, so they cannot yet be considered a complete replacement for the original programs.