Cronkite: a fast, native office suite for Linux, macOS, and Windows (preview)

Cronkite in a minute

An animated tour of Brick, Slate, Frame, and Etch, under a minute, with sound. Want more? Watch the full tour (6 minutes).

The apps

Each app installs and runs on its own. Install all four with one command, or only what you need.

Available now

Brick

Spreadsheet

Opens gigabyte CSV files in a blink and edits .xlsx workbooks with formulas, multiple sheets, and cell styles. Saves never corrupt your file, and 00123 stays 00123.

Install Brick ↓

Available now

Slate

Word processor

Opens, edits, and saves Word documents (.docx), Markdown, and plain text on one endless page, in each document's own fonts and styles. A slim format bar instead of a ribbon, find and replace, and your unsaved edits back after a crash. Saving a .docx changes only what you edited.

Install Slate ↓

Available now

Frame

Presentations

Opens, edits, plays, and saves PowerPoint decks (.pptx), directly on the slide or in an outline, with one inspector instead of a ribbon. Saving changes only what you edited.

Install Frame ↓

Available now

Etch

Image editor

A simple paint program, closer to Paint than to Photoshop. Opens and saves PNG, JPEG, and BMP; draws with a pencil, brush, fill, lines, rectangles, ellipses, and text; selects, moves, crops, resizes, rotates, and flips, and copies and pastes with other apps. Every step undoes.

Install Etch ↓

See them work

Screenshots of the current releases on Linux; on macOS and Windows (preview), each app has the system's own title bar and menus. Click one to see it full size.

Brick showing a 1 GB CSV file at its last rows, row numbers past 19 million, with the status bar reading 19,094,579 rows. — **Brick**A 1 GB CSV with 19 million rows, one Ctrl+End from the top to the bottom.

Brick's find bar searching the 19-million-row file for portland, at match 1 of 2,725,768. — **Brick**Find searches the whole file in the background: 2.7 million matches for “portland”.

Brick with an Excel workbook: a styled budget table with currency formats, a total row, three sheet tabs, and a SUM formula in the formula bar. — **Brick**An Excel workbook with its sheets, cell styles, number formats, and formulas.

Slate showing a Word document in its own fonts, with a title, headings, a bulleted list, and a bar chart on one continuous page, and a format bar above it with the style, font, size, and alignment. — **Slate**A Word document in its own fonts and styles, on one endless page, with a slim format bar instead of a ribbon.

Slate's find bar searching a Markdown file for tune-up, with four matches highlighted, including two in a table. — **Slate**Markdown shown formatted, and find highlights every match, tables included.

Frame with a PowerPoint deck: the slide list on the left, a slide with a bar chart in the middle, and the inspector on the right. — **Frame**A PowerPoint deck: slides on the left, one inspector on the right, no ribbon.

Frame's outline view listing each slide's title and bullets as one editable outline. — **Frame**The outline view: type titles and bullets, and Frame makes the slides.

Etch with a poster designed on its 1024 by 768 canvas: on deep green, the headline Spring Ride, the date and place in amber, a coral Free entry tag, an amber sun cropped at the top right, and an off-white bicycle on an amber road. On the left the tool column with the rectangle tool on; below, the colours, the hex field showing #E4572E, the 20-colour palette, the size, and the Outline, Filled, and Both buttons. — **Etch**A poster made in Etch with its fill, ellipse, line, rectangle, and text tools, in colours typed into the hex field.

Install

All four apps with one command, for your user only, on Linux, macOS, or Windows (preview). No sudo or admin rights, no package manager. It runs each app's own installer in turn, keeps going if one fails, and ends with how each went.

Linux and macOS

curl -fsSL https://cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh

Paste it into a terminal; then start the apps from your app menu, or on a Mac from Launchpad or Applications. Only some of them: name them, as in curl -fsSL https://cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh -s -- slate frame.

Windows (preview)

irm https://cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex

Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. Paste it into PowerShell; then start the apps from the Start menu. Only some of them: $env:CRONKITE_APPS = "slate frame"; irm https://cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex.

Or one app at a time

Each app also has its own command, which the suite's runs.

Brick

curl -fsSL https://brick.cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh

On Linux the command is brick, and CSV and TSV files open with it. Download page: brick.cronkite.cc.

Slate

curl -fsSL https://slate.cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh

On Linux the command is slate, Word documents (.docx) and Markdown (.md) open with it, and it offers to open plain text. Download page: slate.cronkite.cc.

Frame

curl -fsSL https://frame.cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh

On Linux the command is frame, and PowerPoint presentations (.pptx) open with it. Download page: frame.cronkite.cc.

Etch

curl -fsSL https://etch.cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh

On Linux the command is etch, and PNG, JPEG, and BMP images open with it. Download page: etch.cronkite.cc.

On Windows (preview)

One PowerShell command per app, for your user only, with no admin rights: paste it into PowerShell, then start the app from the Start menu.

irm https://brick.cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex

irm https://slate.cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex

irm https://frame.cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex

irm https://etch.cronkite.cc/install.ps1 | iex

Each app's download page has the same command and the app's Setup.exe.

What an installer does

The suite's command runs the apps' installers one after another. Each one:

Downloads the app's latest release for your system and checks it against its published sha256. If the checksum doesn't match, nothing is installed.
On Linux, puts the app (brick, slate, frame, etch) in ~/.local/bin, and its menu entry and icon in ~/.local/share. On a Mac, puts it (Brick.app, …) in ~/Applications, with GTK and everything else it needs inside. On Windows, runs the app's Setup, which puts it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs with GTK and everything else it needs inside, adds it to the Start menu, and lists it in Settings > Apps.
On Linux, makes it the default app for its files (above), so double-clicking one opens it; other apps' defaults for other files are kept. On a Mac, its files list it under Open With, and your default apps stay as they are: to make it one, select a file in Finder, then File > Get Info > Open with > Change All. On Windows, its files list it under Open with, and your default apps stay as they are: to make it one, right-click a file, then Open with > Choose another app > the app > Always.

Requirements

macOS: a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 Sonoma or later; nothing else to install. Intel Macs aren't supported.

Linux: an x86_64 system with GTK 4.14 or newer. GNOME desktops already have it. Tested on Arch, Ubuntu 24.04, and Fedora, and newer releases of each. If GTK 4 is missing, the installer tells you how to get it:

Distribution	Install GTK 4
Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS	`sudo pacman -S gtk4`
Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+	`sudo apt install libgtk-4-1`
Fedora	`sudo dnf install gtk4`
openSUSE	`sudo zypper install libgtk-4-1`

Windows (preview): Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit; nothing else to install.

Update

Run the install command again, the suite's or an app's. It replaces the old versions and keeps your settings and recent files.

Uninstall

curl -fsSL https://cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh -s -- --uninstall

& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://cronkite.cc/install.ps1))) -Uninstall

Removes all four apps, on Linux with their menu entries and file defaults; on Windows, as Settings > Apps would. Your files, settings, and recent files are untouched. Only some of them: name them, as in sh -s -- --uninstall slate or -Uninstall -Apps slate.

One app on its own: its install command with | sh -s -- --uninstall in place of | sh, as in curl -fsSL https://slate.cronkite.cc/install.sh | sh -s -- --uninstall. On Windows, remove it in Settings > Apps > Installed apps, or run & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://slate.cronkite.cc/install.ps1))) -Uninstall (with the app's address).

Prefer a download?

Each app's download page has its latest release as a Linux .tar.gz, a Mac .dmg, and, in preview, a Windows Setup.exe, with its version, size, and sha256: Brick, Slate, Frame, Etch.

The apps aren't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time you open one from a DMG, macOS says it can't check it. On macOS 15 or later, open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on macOS 14, Control-click the app in Applications and choose Open. Or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Brick.app (with the app's name) once in Terminal. The install commands need none of this.

Nor are they signed for Windows yet, so when you open a downloaded Setup.exe, Windows may say “Windows protected your PC”: click More info, then Run anyway. Setup installs for your user and asks for no admin rights. The PowerShell commands need none of this.

Source

Cronkite is open source (MIT or Apache-2.0) and built in the open: github.com/avdrav1/cronkite.