ELY-Open-Source/ElyOffice

The problem

Desktop office work now assumes an account. Word, Excel and PowerPoint want a Microsoft 365 subscription and OneDrive; Google Docs wants a browser and a Google account. If you want your documents to live in ordinary folders and never leave your machine, you are left stitching together LibreOffice, a separate PDF editor, a mail client and a Markdown viewer. Ely Office bundles that set into one install: document, spreadsheet, presentation, PDF, mail, Git, Markdown and an agent app, sharing a look and a local-first model.

What's different

The format engines are not new. ElyDoc, ElyTable and ElyShow run on LibreOfficeKit; ElyPDF uses MuPDF plus Tesseract for OCR; ElyMail has its own IMAP/POP3/SMTP stack over SQLite. The difference is the integration and the UI layer: one Rust/GPUI shell over these engines, no account, no cloud, and files kept in your own folders, with mail following the system proxy. A comparison: LibreOffice is the engine supplier but behaves like separate large applications with their own UI conventions; OnlyOffice offers a similar multi-app desktop suite but is built around collaboration servers; Google Workspace is the opposite trade-off, cloud-first. Here the apps are thin clients over the same engines, so compatibility should track upstream LibreOffice rather than a from-scratch implementation.

Who it's for

Good fit for privacy-conscious individual users and small teams on Windows, macOS or Linux who mostly work offline and want DOCX/XLSX/PPTX compatibility without a Microsoft account. Also reasonable for developers who want mail, a Git client and Markdown in the same package. Look elsewhere if you need real-time co-editing, cloud sync across devices, or Microsoft 365 add-ins and macros, because the README describes no such service. Also skip it if an unproven project is a risk you cannot take.

Cost of adoption

There is a download for Windows, macOS and Linux, so end users can try packaged builds. Building from source is heavy: the scripts fetch and build a patched LibreOffice (the README says about an hour), a patched MuPDF and Git, and the Windows path involves Cygwin and MSBuild. ElyMail needs a Microsoft client ID at build time. The licence is MIT, but the bundled engines keep their own licences (see docs/licenses.md), so redistribution and branding constraints need checking. The README is detailed on building but says little about sync, extensibility or the maturity of each app.

Verdict

This is a brand-new project: five days old, yet it has already taken in about 970 stars, with a new-board rate around +191 stars per day. That is a spike, not a track record; it has not been seen on the daily trending board and has no Hacker News discussion. The design is pragmatic: reuse battle-tested engines and focus on integration, the shell and offline operation. But nine apps, including mail and an agent, in a five-day-old repository is a lot of surface area, and the first release is where bugs and format gaps will show. Worth a look if offline-first matters to you; not yet something to move your working documents onto.