ox

Read and edit Office documents from the terminal.

A single native binary with no dependencies. Treats .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx files like text files — read, edit, search, pipe to grep. Designed for humans and AI agents.

Install

Download from GitHub Releases:

Platform	Download
Linux x64	ox-linux-x64.tar.gz
macOS ARM64	ox-osx-arm64.tar.gz
Windows x64	ox-win-x64.zip

# Linux / macOS
tar xzf ox-*.tar.gz
sudo mv ox /usr/local/bin/

# Build from source (.NET 10 SDK required)
dotnet publish src/Ox -r linux-x64 -c Release -p:PublishAot=true -p:StripSymbols=true
sudo cp src/Ox/bin/Release/net10.0/linux-x64/publish/ox /usr/local/bin/

The output is a native AOT-compiled binary. No .NET runtime needed.

Commands

ox cat <file>...    Dump plain text (pipe to grep to search)
ox read <file>...   Read content with character offset/limit
ox info <file>      Show metadata (title, author, word count)
ox edit <file>...   Replace text (use \n for new paragraphs)
ox comment          Add, list, or remove comments

Examples

Read a document:

ox read report.docx

Search across a directory of documents:

ox cat "**/*.docx" | grep -i "budget"
# reports/Q1.docx:Revenue exceeded budget by 15%
# reports/Q3.docx:Budget review scheduled for Monday

Edit text:

ox edit report.docx --old "Draft" --new "Final"

Insert new paragraphs (use \n):

ox edit report.docx --old "Introduction" --new "Introduction\nThis report covers Q1 results."

Delete text:

ox edit report.docx --old "Remove this sentence." --new ""

Find and replace across files:

ox edit "**/*.docx" --old "Acme Corp" --new "Globex Inc" --replace-all
# contracts/nda.docx: replaced 3 occurrences
# contracts/sow.docx: replaced 7 occurrences
# total: 10 replacements across 2 files

Preview before editing:

ox edit report.docx --old "Draft" --new "Final" --dry-run
# would replace 1 occurrence

Edit with tracked changes:

ox edit report.docx --old "Draft" --new "Final" --track --author "Dan"

Add a comment:

ox comment add report.docx --at "revenue figures" --text "Need source for this claim"

Design

Unix philosophy. Plain text in, plain text out. Compose with grep, awk, wc, diff, or any tool that works with text. Multi-file output prefixes lines with filenames, just like grep -r.

Agent native. Built for AI coding agents like Claude Code. The read command has character-based --offset and --limit for deterministic pagination. The edit command works like an agent's code editor — match unique text and replace it. \n creates new paragraphs just as it creates new lines in code. Glob patterns let agents search and edit across entire directories.

Zero dependency. Single native binary, AOT-compiled. No .NET runtime, no Python, no Java. Copy it anywhere and it runs.

Safe by default. Edits require unique text matches — ambiguous matches fail with a clear error. Use --replace-all for bulk operations. --dry-run previews changes. --backup creates .docx.bak files. Lock detection warns when Word has a file open.