Five Open-Source Office and Photo Apps Claude Can Run Button by Button
Open-source rebuilds of Photoshop, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Acrobat, with real file formats and a command for every button. What each one does, how to install them, the one line that connects Claude, the catch, and prompts to start with
One team has rebuilt five of the most-used desktop apps from scratch in Rust: a Photoshop-style photo editor, a Word-style word processor, an Excel-style spreadsheet, a PowerPoint-style slide app and a PDF editor. Together they have more than 105,000 stars on GitHub, and all five are free under the MIT or Apache-2.0 license.
Here's what each one does, how to install them, how to let Claude run them, and the catch.
What they are
- PhotoCraft (66,000+ stars): layers, masks, adjustment layers, type and real layered PSD files.
- WordCraft (14,000+ stars): opens and saves .docx, with track changes, comments, tables of contents and PDF export.
- GridCraft (5,600+ stars): .xlsx is its native format, with 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions, charts and PivotTables.
- DeckCraft (3,700+ stars): slides, shapes, transitions and a slide sorter, like PowerPoint.
- PdfCraft (15,000+ stars): read, comment, fill and sign forms, and organize pages.
- All of them run natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD, and in the browser. Every menu item and button is a command, and the same commands can be run from the app, a command line or an AI agent.
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Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (4 more sections, 2 copy-paste prompts) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
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