Docxy

A fast terminal (TUI) viewer and editor for Microsoft Word .docx and Markdown — right where you live, in the terminal.

Docxy opens real .docx files — text, tables, lists, styles, even images — renders them faithfully in a character grid, and lets you edit and save them losslessly. It reads and writes Markdown too, converts between the two, and exports to PDF. No Office, no browser, no network: it's a single static binary on top of a small, dependency-free OOXML engine.

Docxy deliberately doesn't reproduce Word's pixel-perfect layout — it renders a faithful, readable view of the document in a character grid, with a familiar ribbon, mouse support, and an optional Vim mode.

Why docxy?

• Stay in the terminal. Read and edit Word documents over SSH, in tmux, or from your editor's shell — no GUI required.
• Lossless by design. Anything docxy doesn't model (bookmarks, fields, content controls, section properties) is preserved byte-for-faithful on save.
• Zero-dependency core. The docxcore crate is pure std — its own ZIP/DEFLATE, XML parser, renderer, and PDF writer — so it's auditable and trivially embeddable.
• One file does it all. .docx ⇄ .md conversion and .docx → .pdf export are built in, scriptable, and headless.

Quick start

cargo install docxy          # or grab a prebuilt binary (see Install)

docxy report.docx            # open a Word document
docxy notes.md               # open / edit Markdown
docxy                        # launch the welcome screen (new file or open)

Want to see it immediately? Generate the showcase document and open it:

cargo run -p docxcore --example gen_sample   # writes assets/sample.docx
docxy assets/sample.docx

Features

Documents & editing

• View & edit paragraphs and runs (bold / italic / underline / strike / color / highlight / sub- & superscript) and tables, including merged cells — navigate and type directly into cells.
• Styles resolved from styles.xml; lists numbered from numbering.xml; headings, indents, alignment, tab stops, and horizontal rules.
• Bidirectional DOCX layout in the terminal editor for Hebrew, Arabic, and mixed LTR/RTL text: paragraph w:bidi, run w:rtl, style-inherited direction, and Unicode bidi controls render in visual order while editing, copy/export, and save offsets remain logical.
• Lossless save — unmodeled parts are preserved exactly.
• Find & replace, full clipboard (syncs with the OS clipboard), selection + formatting, word navigation, and show-invisibles.
• Headers & footers, multi-section page layout, and print/page view.
• Tracked-change review for insertions, deletions, and run/paragraph/table/ row/cell/section property changes. Review previous/next, accept or reject the current change, or confirm accept/reject all; each action is undoable and survives save/reload. Unsupported move/custom records stay lossless.
• Compare an original .docx with a revised one into tracked insertions and deletions — Accept All gives the revised text, Reject All the original, and neither source file is written. Review ▸ Compare and doc.compare open the result as a new, unsaved Compare Result N.docx; docxy compare orig.docx rev.docx -o out.docx writes it to out.docx (never overwriting a file).
• Mail merge — the desktop suite's Mailings tab: attach a CSV recipient list, insert merge fields, an Address Block or a Greeting Line, preview each record in place, check for errors, and Finish & Merge into a new document; Envelopes and Labels lay out an envelope section or a sheet of labels. docxy merge main.docx list.csv -o out.docx runs the merge headless (never overwriting a file).
• DOCX protection honored across TUI and automation edits: read-only, comments-only, and formatting-only restrictions are enforced; unsupported forms-only and tracked-changes-only editing fails closed. Recommendation-only write protection remains editable with a warning; password-backed write protection fails closed as read-only until password verification is supported.
• Watermark previews in page view: applied text watermarks render as non-interactive overlays, while picture or unsupported watermarks show a preview-unavailable label. Overlay text never enters copy/export output or saved OOXML.

Markdown

• Open and edit .md files directly; Save As to a .md or .docx name converts between the two.
• View ▸ Markdown toggles a .md file between the rendered document and its raw source.
• Headings, bold/italic/strike, inline code, fenced code blocks, blockquotes, links, bullet/ordered lists, thematic rules, and pipe tables all map across — and round-trip through .docx via real Word styles.
• Scientific formulas: $…$ inline and $$…$$ display math (LaTeX) convert to and from native Word equations (OMML) — fractions, roots, \sum/\int with limits, Greek, scripts, \left…\right, and named functions.
• Mermaid diagrams: a ```mermaid block becomes a native Word drawing (DrawingML shapes + connectors, laid out automatically); the Mermaid source is embedded so Word → Markdown restores the exact block. Flowcharts are laid out fully; other diagram types are best-effort.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗