Build log · Software & apps

The Craft Suite — 13 free Rust apps that replace Photoshop and Excel, and the CLI nobody installs

Software & appsdone1 versionsRustopen source13 apps6,986 CLI commands
▶ ⬇ Download the pack (9 KB)▶ Official apps page▶ Official launcher📄 Raw spec (.md)📁 Portfolio

reflection not written yet · every fact below is generated from this project’s own spec and files

What it is

Thirteen clean-room Rust apps that replace Photoshop, Acrobat, Office, AutoCAD and Figma — audited for Adobe code, all 13 driven from the terminal on my own files, and packaged with a 9 KB download pack that installs the CLI layer the official launcher leaves out.

Version history

Straight from the project’s own card data — what each version added.

V1

13 apps audited, 13 CLIs installed and smoke-tested, download pack published with sha256

What broke, and what I’d change

Not written yet. This is the part only I can write — what actually went wrong, and what I’d do differently. It lives in builds/reflections/craft-suite.md (see _TEMPLATE.md); as soon as that file has words in it, this section fills in on the next build.

Everything else on this page — the spec, the version history, the file counts — is generated from the project’s own build notes and files, so nothing here is guesswork.

Build spec

The project’s own build notes, rendered. Open the raw .md ↗

Show the spec

The Craft Suite — 13 apps, 6,986 CLI commands, and the "AI cracked Adobe" claim

Category: Investigations · Status: Done

An audit of the ArtCraft "Crafting Apps": thirteen clean-room Rust replacements for Photoshop, Acrobat, Premiere, Lightroom, Illustrator, After Effects, AutoCAD, Excel, InDesign, PowerPoint, Word, Pro Tools and Figma. All thirteen GUIs were installed, then each app's separately-released headless CLI was installed and driven against this machine's own files — a DT poster, a Chinese product guide, a school deck and a Fusion 360-style DXF. Result: 6,986 CLI commands across the set, 1.76 GB on disk, a valid PSD written and read back, an A1 poster rasterised in 12 ms, a CJK docx converted in 0.21 s, a pptx slide rendered in 0.34 s, and a faux redaction recovered from underneath a black rectangle. The viral claim that "someone cracked Adobe" was checked against the installed 181 MB PhotoCraft binary: no Adobe libraries, no .8bf plug-ins, no ICC files, no Adobe copyright strings — the 83 "adobe" matches are PSD/XMP namespace names the format requires. The AI part of the rumour is true and is the interesting part: the repos ship an 18.7 KB AGENTS.md and .claude rules and commit at roughly 100 commits per day. A download pack (installer + verifier + manifest, 9,005 B, sha256-pinned) was built and published so the CLI layer — which the official launcher does not install — can be reproduced in one command.

Stack / Tools: Rust (the apps), bash 3.2 installer/verifier, GitHub Releases API, Python 3.9+ (JSON counting), Playwright/urllib (live verification), Cloudflare Pages + a Worker file proxy

Build path:

  • V1 — Read getartcraft.com/apps and all 13 repos, pulled stars/languages/push dates from the GitHub API, confirmed all 14 bundles already in /Applications. Found no <app>-cli on PATH.
  • V1.1 — Wrote the CLI installer. First version died at line 12 with photocraft: unbound variable (bash 3.2 under set -u); rewrote it with a ver_of() case block, curl -C -, quarantine stripping and symlinks. Installed all 13 (~1.76 GB) in the background.
  • V1.2 — Verified every CLI by hand: PDF render/info/text/audit, xlsx formula round-trip via check, DXF→SVG→PDF, docx→PDF, pptx→PNG, PSD creation, laser SVG with --outline-text.
  • V1.3 — Corrected the command counts. First pass counted output lines, which inflated the total to 32,264 because several apps pretty-print JSON and indent parameter docs under each command. Re-derived as registry entries (JSON arrays / column-0 lines): 6,986, consistent between Python and the shipped bash verifier.
  • V1.4 — Published the pack (installers/Craft-Suite-CLI-Pack-v1.0.zip) through the files proxy; verified the served bytes hash to the local build.
  • V2 (open) — Prove FilmCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft, SoundCraft and FigCraft on real projects; those five are reported as "CLI responds" only.

Known traps:

  • getartcraft.com/app is a 404; the web studio is app.getartcraft.com.
  • The /apps download button serves a Linux .flatpak even on a Mac — use the launcher release page.
  • pdfcraft-cli batch --steps ocr needs PDFCRAFT_MODELS=/Applications/PdfCraft.app/Contents/Resources/models, and rejects --language zh.
  • Running /Applications/PdfCraft.app/Contents/MacOS/PdfCraft --help launches the GUI and hangs the shell; use the CLI binary.
  • Argument styles are not uniform: pdfcraft-cli render … --out x.png (flag) vs deckcraft-cli render in.pptx --slide 0 out.png (positional); gridcraft-cli run takes --out for a new file and --in only for an existing one; cell.set wants {cell, input}, not {range, value}.
  • deckcraft-cli info <pptx> exits 1; render works.
  • photocraft-cli has no image.resizeImage; query <app>-cli commands first.
  • macOS ships no timeout, so the verifier wraps each call in a perl alarm.

Source folder: /tmp/craft-pack (pack build), ~/.hermes/scripts/craft-cli-install.sh (installer) The user's own build spec for this project is at the end of this file.

Where it lives

The user's own words

"can you put it onto my portfolio and saying this apps analysis and the download pack and link to the official link"