storytold/deckcraft

Presentations and slide shows; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft PowerPoint, rebuilt in pure Rust.

Build decks with themes, layouts, shapes, pictures, tables, charts, transitions and animations, open and save PowerPoint files, and present them full screen. Native on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser. Every button is also a command that the CLI and AI agents (through MCP) can drive.

DeckCraft on getartcraft.com · ArtCraft · All Crafting Apps

What works · Getting started · Agents, CLI and MCP · Roadmap · Downloads · The Crafting Apps · License

DeckCraft is in alpha, heading for beta (see the roadmap). Today it can:

• Make decks: slide masters and eleven layouts with placeholders that inherit position and formatting, eight original themes with colour and font schemes, sections, notes, comments, headers and footers, custom slide sizes.
• Draw: 150+ preset shapes with adjust handles, connectors that stay glued to shapes, freeform, curve and scribble tools, merge shapes (union, combine, fragment, intersect, subtract), gradient, picture and pattern fills, outlines with dashes and arrowheads, shadows, glow, soft edges and reflections.
• Write: in-place text editing with full font and paragraph formatting, bullets and numbering, columns, autofit, vertical text, fields and hyperlinks.
• Add content: pictures with crop and corrections, tables with styles, charts, SmartArt basics, audio and video (MP3, AAC, FLAC, ALAC, Ogg, Opus, WAV, AIFF; H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1).
• Present: transitions (including Morph), entrance/emphasis/exit and motion-path animations, by-paragraph builds, full-screen slide show, presenter view, pen, rehearse timings, media playback.
• Exchange files: open and save PowerPoint .pptx, export PDF (slides, notes pages, handouts with selectable text), PNG/JPEG and outlines. Unsaved work is kept by AutoRecover.
• Automate: 200+ commands with undo, all scriptable from the CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server for AI agents.

Shape Format contextual tab and selection handles	Format Shape pane: gradient type, direction and stops
Slide Sorter with each slide's transition	Dark mode, with a native chart

_{The built-in sample deck, rendered by deckcraft-cli render --sample --all}

git clone https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft
cd deckcraft
cargo run --release -p deckcraft-cli -- render --sample --all --scale 1 out/

On Linux, the build also needs the ALSA headers for slide-show sound: alsa-lib-devel on Fedora, libasound2-dev on Debian and Ubuntu, alsa-lib on Arch. Without them it stops at alsa-sys.

Fonts come from craft-fonts: clone it next to this repo (../craft-fonts) and local builds pick it up automatically; without it DeckCraft uses your system fonts.

Each GitHub release has ready-made builds, on Linux as an AppImage, a .deb, an .rpm and a tarball. On Gentoo, the community ::snakebyte overlay packages the Linux release as app-office/deckcraft-bin (not maintained by the DeckCraft team):

eselect repository add snakebyte git https://github.com/switch87/snakebyte-overlay.git
emaint sync -r snakebyte
echo 'app-office/deckcraft-bin ~amd64' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/deckcraft
emerge --ask app-office/deckcraft-bin

The desktop app writes its log records to standard error and to logs/deckcraft.log in the settings directory, beside ui.json and prefs.json (Linux ~/.config/deckcraft/logs/, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/deckcraft/logs/; macOS ~/Library/Application Support/DeckCraft/logs/; Windows %APPDATA%\DeckCraft\logs\). A start from a desktop menu or the Dock has no terminal, so this file is what to attach to a bug report: the crash guard's panic report, a failed crash-recovery save, PowerPoint parts skipped on import and audio output problems land there. Each launch moves the previous log to deckcraft.1.log (and that one to deckcraft.2.log), so the log of a run that crashed survives the next start. The file stops growing at 16 MiB. --version writes no file.

The logger is apps/deckcraft/src/logging.rs; the realtime audio callback does not log. The web app logs to the browser console instead.

Every action in DeckCraft is a command with a stable id, so people, scripts and AI agents use the same verbs:

deckcraft-cli commands format.          # list commands
deckcraft-cli run --sample --cmd 'slide.new={"layout":"titleOnly","title":"Hello"}' --save hello.deckcraft
deckcraft-cli mcp                       # MCP server over stdio (headless)
deckcraft-cli mcp --connect 7990        # drive the running app (deckcraft --control 7990)

DeckCraft is in alpha. It covers 79% of PowerPoint's features by breadth (92% of the core ones, measured) and is about 55% of the way to replacing PowerPoint for real work (estimated). See ROADMAP.md for the stage, numbers by dimension and what's next, docs/target-app-parity.md for the full assessment, docs/gaps.md for every known shortfall and docs/parity-checklist.md for the feature-by-feature checklist.

Download DeckCraft from GitHub: the latest release has every build listed below, and all releases has earlier versions and their notes. <ver> in the file names is the version number, and SHA256SUMS.txt lists a checksum for every file.

Installers and executables are code-signed.

If the app doesn't open on Windows: the desktop app initializes only DirectX 12 by default. Letting wgpu also create an OpenGL instance can crash some graphics drivers (AMD's atio6axx.dll) before the window appears, so the app would flash in Task Manager and quit. WGPU_BACKEND overrides the default for troubleshooting (for example dx12 or vulkan). In PowerShell, from the folder containing the executable:

$env:WGPU_BACKEND = "vulkan"
& .\deckcraft.exe
Remove-Item Env:WGPU_BACKEND                     # restore the default for later launches

An explicit gl override can bring the driver crash back on affected systems. The macOS, Linux and web backend defaults are unchanged.

RISC-V 64 (riscv64): deckcraft-<ver>-linux-riscv64.tar.gz, a tarball only (cross-compiled; needs glibc 2.39+, e.g. Ubuntu 24.04+).

DeckCraft is one of the Crafting Apps: free, open-source creative tools from the ArtCraft team, each written from scratch in Rust and each able to stand on its own.

	App	What it's for	Code	Learn more
	PhotoCraft	Image editing: layers, masks, type and real PSD files	GitHub	Website
	VectorCraft	Vector illustration	GitHub	Website
	FilmCraft	Video editing, color and sound	GitHub	Website
	LightCraft	Photo library and raw development	GitHub	Website
	PdfCraft	Reading, organizing and protecting PDFs	GitHub	Website
	EffectCraft	Motion graphics and visual effects	GitHub	Website
	DesignCraft	Page layout and publishing	GitHub	Website
	DeckCraft	Presentations and slide shows · you are here	GitHub	Website

And ArtCraft itself, our AI image and video studio for artists who want real control.

Our Discord is where artists of every kind hang out: people who paint, shoot, draw, cut film, set type, and people still figuring out what they like to make. Share what you're working on, ask for help, tell us what's broken, or tell us what you wish these tools could do. Whatever your medium and however long you've been at it, you're welcome here.

discord.gg/artcraft · getartcraft.com · The Crafting Apps · DeckCraft

DeckCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Copyright (c) 2026 ArtCraft Team and the DeckCraft contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE.

Bundled fonts, icons, images and other assets keep their own open licenses; each one is listed with its author, source and license in ATTRIBUTION.md.

DeckCraft's themes, layouts, shape geometry, icons and sample decks are original work, drawn or generated in code; no Microsoft artwork, fonts, themes or templates are used.

The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos in docs/brand/ are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team and are not covered by this license. They may be used only unmodified, and only as part of this repository and DeckCraft, under docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt. Forks and modified versions must remove them.

_{Microsoft and PowerPoint are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. DeckCraft is an independent, open-source project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation or Adobe Inc.; these names are used only to describe the workflows it is compatible with.}

_{Made by the ArtCraft team and community.}