WordCraft Download — Every Build for Windows, macOS and Linux (v0.7.0)

Which WordCraft build should you download?

Ninety percent of people need one of two files. On Windows, the x64 MSI is the right choice for a normal modern PC — it installs, registers shortcuts and is code-signed. If you cannot install software (a locked-down machine, a USB stick, a shared PC) take the x64 portable zip instead: unzip and run, nothing written to the registry. On a Mac, there is only one build — the universal DMG, which runs on both Apple silicon and Intel machines and is signed and notarized, so Gatekeeper opens it without any right-click workaround.

Everything else is for narrower cases: ARM64 and 32-bit Windows builds for those specific machines, four package formats for Linux, one tarball for FreeBSD, and a WebAssembly build for people who want to try WordCraft before installing anything.

The version gap: v0.7.0 on GitHub, v0.5.0 on the official site

This is the one thing worth knowing before you download. On 2026-10-16 this guide fetched getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft and every download button on it still pointed at the v0.5.0 assets; the project's GitHub releases, meanwhile, were at v0.7.0 (published 2026-10-14), with v0.6.1 in between. The official site's page is not wrong so much as stale — it will presumably catch up — but if you download from the site today you get a build that is two releases behind, missing the v0.6.x and v0.7.0 fixes.

The practical consequence: v0.7.0 includes work that landed after the site page was last regenerated — print job submission through craft-print, WMF and EMF metafile insertion, Wingdings/Webdings/Symbol rendering as Unicode, RTF code-page handling, font-list memory fixes, and a batch of layout corrections. That is why every link on this page points at the GitHub release rather than mirroring the site's buttons. Both sources are official (the site's links also resolve to GitHub), so nothing is unsafe either way — you are just choosing which version you get.

What you actually get: WordCraft in one paragraph

WordCraft is a native desktop word processor — the ribbon, Styles gallery, tables, track changes, comments, footnotes, citations and mail merge are all there, and it opens and saves .docx so files round-trip through Microsoft Word. The project's README claims 389 discrete commands drive the ribbon, keyboard shortcuts, a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, which is what makes it interesting beyond "free Word": an agent can generate or edit documents through the same surface a person clicks.

It is honest about being unfinished. The README's own status framing is early alpha, and the project publishes a parity assessment and a generated feature checklist rather than claiming feature-for-feature equality. For everyday document work it is usable today; for complex client documents with heavy macro or template dependencies, test on a copy first.

After downloading: first launch and the two Windows gotchas

Installing is uneventful — run the MSI or open the DMG, launch the app, and no account or signup step appears, because the family has none. Docx files open from the File menu or by double-clicking if you let the installer associate the extension.

Two Windows-specific issues are documented by the project and worth knowing before you assume the download is broken. First, the desktop app initialises only DirectX 12 by default; on some older AMD drivers the app flashes in Task Manager and quits before the window appears, which is fixed by setting the WGPU_BACKEND environment variable to vulkan. Second, on 32-bit Windows the DirectX 12 graphics pipeline fails immediately and the app exits — the 32-bit build is intended to run on OpenGL, and WGPU_BACKEND=vulkan still overrides it. Neither is a bad download; both are driver paths.

• App quits right after the window appears → set WGPU_BACKEND=vulkan and relaunch (PowerShell: $env:WGPU_BACKEND = "vulkan").
• Slow on an older Windows PC → the app falls back to OpenGL automatically when DX12 only offers a software renderer; the log lines starting with 'graphics:' record the choice.
• Linux on Wayland → run with WORDCRAFT_WAYLAND=1 for sharper text at fractional scaling, at the cost of file drag-and-drop.
• Arch Linux → community AUR packages (wordcraft-bin, wordcraft, wordcraft-git) exist; the project does not publish to the AUR itself.

Verify the download before you install it

Every release ships a SHA256SUMS.txt listing a checksum for each file — the download page's checksum link goes straight to it. Because the file sizes on this page are real (75.9 MB for the Windows MSI, 100.1 MB for the DMG, and so on), a truncated or altered download is easy to spot before you run it: if the size does not match, the file did not arrive intact.

The other verification is provenance. WordCraft installers and executables are code-signed, macOS builds are signed and notarized, and the only official source is the storytold organisation on GitHub. Third-party "download portals" that repackage ArtCraft apps are not the project — avoid them, particularly while the software is this young.

Build from source instead

If you would rather compile it, the project needs Rust 1.90 or newer. Clone the repository and run the desktop crate directly — the README's own quick start is: git clone https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft, cd wordcraft, cargo run --release -p wordcraft. Building from source gets you the unreleased main branch rather than the tagged release, which is worth knowing if you hit a bug that only exists between releases.

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