Downloading and installing WordCraft, safely

Where the installers come from

The project publishes builds on GitHub Releases and nowhere else. The latest release carries every build listed below; the all releases page keeps earlier versions. There is no separate download site to be confused with a mirror, no installer offered through a third-party store, and no "get the free download" button that starts a subscription flow. If a page offers you WordCraft and it is not a GitHub release, it is not the official build.

Every official build

Two practical notes from the same files. On a headless or unusual graphics setup the Linux build falls back automatically — it prefers OpenGL, and if no usable adapter exists it can use DirectX 12's WARP software adapter, with the choice written to the log file. On Wayland, start the app with WORDCRAFT_WAYLAND=1 wordcraft.

Package managers, and who actually maintains them

Worth being precise here, because "install it with your package manager" hides who is responsible for what.

• Flatpak — official builds, flatpak install --user <file>, sandboxed.
• Arch Linux (AUR) — community packages, maintained by AUR users, not by the project, which does not publish to the AUR itself. wordcraft-bin installs the prebuilt release tarball (x86_64, aarch64) and is the fastest route; wordcraft builds the latest release from source with cargo; wordcraft-git tracks the current main branch from source and, in the project's own words, means accepting an occasional broken build. Typical use: yay -S wordcraft-bin or paru -S wordcraft-bin.
• Gentoo — the community ::snakebyte overlay packages the Linux release as app-office/wordcraft-bin (prebuilt) and app-office/wordcraft (from source).

There is no official Homebrew, Chocolatey, Scoop or winget package for WordCraft. If a search result offers you one, treat it as third-party.

How to check you got the real thing

Three checks, in order of how much they tell you. First, download from the GitHub Releases page — it is the only distribution channel the project documents. Second, trust the signature rather than the download page: the Windows installers and executables are code-signed, so Windows will show a publisher instead of an unknown publisher, and the macOS build is signed and notarized, so Gatekeeper opens it without the right-click ritual you need for SolidCraft. Third, if you want to go further, build it yourself — the source is public and the CI runs formatting, clippy with warnings as errors, roughly 800 tests, an asset-attribution check, a layering check and a wasm32 build:

The command line, which is the more interesting half

WordCraft ships wordcraft-cli as a separate binary, and it is not a thin wrapper — it is the same engine the interface drives.

If your workflow involves a document that arrives as an email attachment and leaves as a PDF, this is the part of WordCraft that is already useful, today, without a licence question.

Letting an agent drive it — and keeping it in its box

The MCP server is the project's central design decision: documents are exposed as objects that an agent can inspect and mutate. Two commands from the README:

• claude mcp add wordcraft -- wordcraft-cli mcp — a headless MCP server over the documents in a folder.
• claude mcp add wordcraft-app -- wordcraft-cli mcp --connect 127.0.0.1:7981 — attach to an already-running app instead.

And the flag that answers the question every reviewer asks first: confine the agent to folders with --automation-read-root DIR --automation-write-root DIR. The agent can then read only what you name and write only where you allow, which turns "give it my documents" from a large risk into a scoped one. The exposed tools include render_page, save_document, inspect_document, and — against a running app — screenshot, click and key.

The licence and the privacy story

WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option. Bundled fonts, icons and images keep their own open licences, and each one is listed with its author, source and licence in the repository's attribution file. The project's own summary of the privacy posture is one line: "Private. Spelling, grammar and everything else work offline." There is no account, no subscription and no cloud service between you and the document. (Spelling dictionaries for some languages are read from the system rather than bundled — a detail that will matter to you on day one if you write in Polish, Russian or Czech.)

Should you install it?

If the documents are yours, and you want a fast word processor that an agent can operate, with no licence line item and no file leaving the machine — yes, and it costs you nothing but the download. If the documents arrive from other people and must go back to them unchanged, with charts, SmartArt and tracked changes intact, then this is the wrong tool: the project's own roadmap lists keeping charts and SmartArt through a round trip as a beta prerequisite, and beta is 15 percentage points and roughly 150 to 230 agent hours away. That is the entire decision, and it is not close.

Frequently asked

Is WordCraft safe to download and install?

The installers come from the project's GitHub Releases page, the Windows installers and executables are code-signed, the macOS build is signed and notarized, the licence is MIT or Apache-2.0, and the project runs roughly 800 tests in CI. There is no account, no subscription and no cloud service, and everything works offline. The caveat worth weighing is maturity rather than safety: it is an alpha that rates itself at about 60% ready for real work.

Does WordCraft need an account or internet connection?

No. There is no sign-in, and the project states that spelling, grammar and everything else work offline. A browser build is available if you would rather evaluate it before installing anything.

Can I install WordCraft on Linux or on ARM?

Yes: official Linux builds cover x86_64 and aarch64 as an AppImage and a Flatpak, plus a tarball, and Windows ships x64, arm64 and x86 installers. The AppImage updates itself through AppImageUpdate. On Arch and Gentoo the packages are community-maintained, which the project states plainly.

Can an AI agent use WordCraft?

Yes, and that is the point of the project. The MCP server, CLI and JSON control channel expose the same commands as the interface, and the MCP server can be restricted to specific read and write roots so an agent cannot wander outside the folders you name.

Sources: WordCraft repository — README.md (Downloads, For agents: CLI and MCP, License and credits) and docs/mcp.md, read 23 October 2026. Version at the time of reading: v0.10.0, released 22 October 2026. We read the repository; we did not run the binaries.