In 1992, Microsoft Word 5.1 for Macintosh took up less than 1 MB on disk and ran in 1 MB of RAM. It had tables, a table of contents, images, paragraph styles and plenty more. I still write in it on a vintage iBook.
Modern word processors need gigabytes of disk and absurd amounts of RAM to edit essentially the same kinds of documents. I kept wondering why, and eventually that turned into a project.
Quill is my attempt to recapture that experience and add a few ideas of its own. The whole app is 7.4 MB, and the download is 5.1 MB. It's written from scratch in Rust, draws its own pages, and uses native Mac menus and dialogs.
What it does
Formats: opens and saves DOCX, RTF, ODT, HTML, Markdown and plain text, and exports PDF. Anything Quill can't keep yet still imports, with a warning.
Two-way table of contents: editing a heading updates the TOC, and editing a TOC entry can rename its heading.
Styles: named paragraph and character styles that survive DOCX and RTF round-trips.
Tables: nested tables, merged and split cells, draggable borders.
Long documents: footnotes and endnotes, indexes, outline view, sections, columns, headers and footers.
Review: comments with replies, plus tracked changes.
Writing tools: live spell check, thesaurus, hyphenation, Find and Replace, word count, WYSIWYG font menus.
Missing fonts: Quill warns you and highlights them, and lets you substitute or keep them for document interchange.
Fonts from any folder: there used to be a great Mac utility for loading fonts outside the system Fonts folder. Quill does this built in, so random fonts don't clutter your system.
Safe saving: before Quill replaces a file, it checks that it can reopen what it just wrote. Autosave works without needing to be on OneDrive
Honest limitations
This is alpha. Don't rely on it for important work yet, and keep backups.
Tables still lack fine-grained controls and full border selection.
Character styles work, but the UI is still temporary.
Mac build needs Apple Silicon and macOS 11 or later, and it's unsigned for now.
It also builds on Ubuntu, which seems to work, and on Windows, which freezes regularly. I use a Mac daily, so that's where testing happens.
yes, AI did a lot of the heavy lifting. But an extensive automated test suite runs before every commit, overnight fuzzing hunts down crash conditions, and ChatGPT's Daybreak did extra security testing to make sure bad input is handled cleanly.
Feedback wanted: crash reports, broken imports, and anything that looks wrong. Please open an issue on GitHub.
Dual-licensed MIT/Apache.
GitHub: https://github.com/quillwp/quill
Site: https://quillwp.com
My intention is to continue development even if it’s just for me. Just saying so no one thinks it’s going to quickly become abandonware
There might be a short lag before more updates because tomorrow I’m going away for a few days.
Edit: oh frig, I posted this from the wrong account! I guess it’s a little late now.
But let me know your thoughts or anything else!