Casual Office

A private, local-only desktop office suite.
Edit Word & Excel documents on your machine — no account, no cloud, no telemetry.

Casual Office is a Tauri 2 desktop shell that wraps two mature browser editors into one single-user app for everyday documents. Files live on your disk — the shell reads and writes them through native OS dialogs and saves back in place. There is no sign-in, no sync server, and nothing leaves your machine.

Each open document gets its own OS window (its own webview process — like native Word/Excel): no tabs, no shared process. The launcher window stays open as your home base.

• Private by construction — local-only, offline-first, zero telemetry, no account.
• Your files, native — saves write back to the real file (no browser "download" flow); set it as your OS default opener for .docx/.xlsx.
• Lightweight — a single small binary on the system webview, not a bundled browser.
• Open source — Apache-2.0 shell; permissively-licensed editors.

See docs/COMPETITIVE_ANALYSIS.md for how it compares to MS 365, Google, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice and others, and docs/ROADMAP.md for what's next.

Builds are currently unsigned. On first launch your OS may warn you — this is expected for an open-source app without a paid signing certificate.

macOS — download the .dmg from Releases, drag Casual Office to Applications, then on first launch:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Casual Office.app"   # clear Gatekeeper quarantine

Windows — run the .msi or .exe installer from Releases (SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway).

Linux — install the .deb or run the .AppImage from Releases.

Once installed, set Casual Office as the default app for .docx/.xlsx/.txt/.md in your file manager to open documents directly.

• First-run setup wizard (name, email, timezone, theme, default folder) — skippable, with input persistence.
• Profile, settings (incl. privacy mode / screen-capture exclusion), and a unified theme (light/dark/system) that propagates from the launcher into every editor window.
• Home screen with recent files — search, type filter, pin/unpin, copy-path, right-click menu.
• Open .docx, .txt, .md, .xlsx, .xlsm, .ods, .csv, .tsv from disk or by drag-and-drop.
• Open-where dialog ("this window or new?") with a remembered preference.
• Crash-safe saving — atomic temp-file write + rename (a failed save can't corrupt your file), and an unsaved-changes guard prompts before closing a modified window.
• Editors boot straight into the document (no web dashboard), with a themed loading screen; the title-bar logo returns you to the launcher.
• Offline-complete: editor icon fonts are bundled (no CDN); works with no network.
• File associations for OS default-app registration; DevTools enabled in release (right-click → Inspect).

The two editors are separate git repos cloned in-tree (gitignored here, versioned upstream).

Toolchain: Rust + Cargo, Node 20+ / pnpm 9+, Bun ≥ 1.3 (docx editor), and the Tauri CLI.

git clone https://github.com/CasualOffice/desktop.git
cd desktop

# One-time: clone the two editor source repos in-tree.
git clone https://github.com/CasualOffice/docs.git   docx
git clone https://github.com/CasualOffice/sheets.git sheets

pnpm install
pnpm prep:editors        # build both editor bundles (--base=./) + copy into apps/shell/public/

pnpm tauri:dev           # dev: Vite HMR + Tauri
pnpm tauri:build         # release bundles for the current OS

On Ubuntu 22.04 you'll also need the Tauri system deps:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libssl-dev librsvg2-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev build-essential curl wget file xdg-utils

Tests: pnpm --filter @deskapp/shell test:e2e (Playwright). CI runs CodeQL, cargo audit, dependency review and a license-deny gate on every PR (.github/workflows/ci.yml); the release-*.yml workflows build per-OS bundles on v* tags.

                              Casual Office (Tauri 2)
                         ┌─────────────┴─────────────┐
                         ▼                           ▼
                  ┌──────────────┐         ┌─────────────────┐
                  │  Launcher    │         │  Doc window 1   │  ← own webview
                  │  window      │         │  (.docx)        │    process
                  │  • Wizard    │         └─────────────────┘
                  │  • Home      │         ┌─────────────────┐
                  │  • Settings  │         │  Doc window 2   │  ← own webview
                  │  • Open-where│         │  (.xlsx)        │    process
                  └──────┬───────┘         └─────────────────┘
                         │ invoke('open_document_window', { kind, file })
                         ▼
                ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                │  Tauri Rust core  (apps/shell/src-tauri)     │
                │  load / atomic save / save-as / recents /    │
                │  profile / settings / theme / privacy /      │
                │  open-window / unsaved-close guard           │
                └──────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                                   ▼
                ~/.config/live.schnsrw.casualoffice/
                  ├─ profile.json   ├─ settings.json
                  ├─ recent.json    └─ avatar.<ext>

Full details: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md · engineering + UX status: docs/PRODUCT_AUDIT.md.

v0.1.0 pre-release. Core open/save is reliable (atomic saves, unsaved-close guard); the launcher and both editors render and save natively across macOS/Windows/Linux. Known gaps and the path to a confident release are tracked in docs/PRODUCT_AUDIT.md.

Casual Office shell: Apache-2.0. Upstream editors keep their own licenses (docx editor MIT, Univer Apache-2.0).