Three small desktop applications that open an OpenDocument file, let you change
what is in it, and save it back as the document it was. xodt is for text
documents, xods for spreadsheets, xodp for presentations. Rust and egui, one
binary each, nothing sent anywhere.
xodt report.odt
xods accounts.ods
xodp deck.odp
There is a launcher too, for a shell or a script that has a file and does not want to know which kind it is:
odox anything.ods
LibreOffice is an office suite and these are lightweight editors. The whole of
xodt starts in well under a second on a document a suite takes several to
load, and reading a document you were sent, fixing a sentence in it and sending
it on is most of what anyone does with one. The applications are also built to
one standard rather than to compatibility with another program: what they
implement is the OASIS OpenDocument specification, and a document that is valid
ODF is a document they are meant to open, whichever application wrote it.
Editing means changing what is there, not authoring. You can type and delete text, split a paragraph and join two, enter a value in a cell, move a shape on a slide and resize it, make text bold, italic, underlined or struck through, undo any of that, and save. You cannot apply other formatting, insert a table or a picture, edit a formula, or find and replace. What you did not touch is written back as it was read, element for element, including the parts these applications have no opinion about: the document you save is the document you opened, with your change in it.
On Debian or Ubuntu, from the Excelano apt repository, which is where updates come from:
curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo sh # one-time
sudo apt install odox
odox is the launcher and it depends on the three applications, so that
installs the whole suite. To take only the ones you want, name them instead —
sudo apt install xods, say, and no application depends on another. amd64 and
arm64 both.
From crates.io, which gives you the binary and nothing around it — no desktop entry, no icon, so a file manager will not offer it:
cargo install xodt
The launcher on its own is cargo install odox, and there it really is on its
own: a crate cannot depend on a Debian package, so the applications are a
separate cargo install each.
From a clone, which is the same package the apt repository serves:
cargo build --release
./packaging/debian/build-deb.sh
sudo apt install ./dist/*.deb
Or from a clone without a package, which puts the binaries, the desktop entries
and the icons under ~/.local so a file manager offers them:
cargo build --release
./packaging/linux/install.sh # --default to open ODF files with them
A Rust toolchain builds all of it and nothing else is needed: no C compiler, no
system libraries at build time, no code generator. Cargo.toml names the
toolchain version the build needs.
Windows and macOS are built and tested from this repository; the applications
are on the Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store as Odox Text, Odox Grid and
Odox Deck. packaging/windows/README.md and packaging/macos/README.md say
how each lane is run.
Give a document on the command line or press Ctrl+O. Ctrl+R re-reads the file from disk, Ctrl+W closes it, and Ctrl+plus, Ctrl+minus and Ctrl+0 change the zoom.
A window opens reading. Ctrl+E, or Edit mode in the Edit menu, turns editing on, and a preference in the same menu opens every document that way. Ctrl+S saves over the file you opened and Ctrl+Shift+S saves somewhere else; Ctrl+Z takes an edit back and Ctrl+Shift+Z puts it back. Closing, opening another document or quitting with changes unsaved asks first. Before a document is saved, what is about to be written is read back and compared with what is in the window, and a difference refuses the save rather than writing a document that would not come back the same.
xodt shows the document as one continuous page at the width its page layout
asks for, with the headings listed beside it; clicking one scrolls to it. In
edit mode a click puts the caret where you clicked and you type into the page
as it is drawn, formatting and all. Enter starts a new paragraph, Shift+Enter
breaks the line, Backspace at the start of a paragraph joins it to the one
before, and the arrows, Page Up and Page Down, Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End, Ctrl+A,
Shift and the clipboard work across paragraphs the way they do in any word
processor. Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U, or the buttons over the page, make the
selection bold, italic or underlined, or what you type next when nothing is
selected; strikethrough is a button. Undo puts the caret back where the edit
was.
xods draws the sheet as a grid with the document's own column widths and cell
styles, one tab per sheet, and shows the formula behind whichever cell you pick.
Typing on the picked cell replaces it, Enter or F2 opens it with what it holds,
Enter commits and moves down, Tab commits and moves right, Escape puts it back,
and Delete clears it. A number is a number, true and false are booleans,
anything else is text. A cell that holds a formula is not edited, and once
anything in the sheet has changed every formula's result is drawn faint until a
spreadsheet application recalculates it.
xodp draws each slide at the size the document sets, with the speaker's notes
under it. In edit mode a click picks one of the slide's shapes, a drag moves it,
a drag on a corner resizes it, and a click on the text in one puts the caret
there to type into it as in xodt, within that shape.
Each application opens one kind of file and says so when handed another, naming the sibling that reads it.
The window draws in the desktop's language where it has one. German is there;
crates/odox-ui/po is where another goes.
crates/odox-core reads and writes the format and has no window in it.
crates/odox-ui is everything a person sees, shared by all three. crates/xodt,
crates/xods and crates/xodp are one screen each over that. crates/odox is
the launcher, which draws nothing and links no toolkit. corpus/ holds
the documents the tests read. packaging/ turns a build into something
installable, one directory per platform. DESIGN.md is where every decision and
its reasoning live; CLAUDE.md is the short guide for a session working here.