Show HN: Doxx – Terminal .docx viewer inspired by Glow

(github.com)

155 points | by w108bmg 11 hours ago ago

40 comments

  • politelemon 11 minutes ago ago

    It would be very nice if this were in a Docker image, so we don't need a go install.

  • majkinetor 34 minutes ago ago

    This looks great, I hope we will have releases for Windows soon. It really does going to my nerves to install MS Office on new machine, and recently I stopped doing that and use Office 365 free version to view and edit docs instead, which is way worst regarding efficiency and privacy, but at least I don't have it on my machine. Its a shame there is no stripped down version of Word that lets me just view docx files and do most basic editing and commenting, that can be installed with winget in seconds. I use markdown for everything, but in enterprise environment when I send markdown to people they convert it to Word and return it back...

    BTW, 8 seconds to start Word? What kind of computer are you using? Word is not performance beast but its not that slow either.

  • ashton314 3 hours ago ago

    Very cool!

    I did something like this with pandoc:

        pandoc -s -t man "$1" | groff -T utf8 -man | ${PAGER:-less}
    
    Keeps a lot or formatting. My favorite way to read a README file in the terminal
  • treetalker 11 hours ago ago

    Great project! Looking forward to trying it out in my law practice.

    The name causes miscues and carries negative connotations, though, on account of its homonym verb (doxxing).

    • w108bmg 6 hours ago ago

      It's 100% intentional wordplay! "Doxxing" documents by exposing their contents in the terminal instead of keeping them locked in Microsoft Word. The whole project is about "liberation from Office" so the pun felt perfect. I'm honestly not too creative so I was bouncing around with Google Gemini on some "clever" names.

      • rafram 3 hours ago ago

        Some people may not want to have a tool called "doxx" installed on their work machines, FWIW.

        • KomoD 2 hours ago ago

          This is such a non-issue, it's just a name.

          If someone asks about it "It's a tool to view docx files", end of conversation

          • 8organicbits 2 hours ago ago

            We've got `git` (an insult), `kill` (violent), `slack` (not doing work) and `fsck` (looks like fuck). Doxx seems ok to me too.

          • jahsome an hour ago ago

            I get the sense you've never worked under the oppresive thumb of dashboard-driven enterprise IT, heh

    • ThreatSystems 8 hours ago ago

      I am genuinely curious, as to how this would be a solution for a law practice? How many lawyers are SSH'd into servers? Or am I being ignorant?

      • btown 6 hours ago ago

        As a non-lawyer who’s nonetheless been asked to help to review internal documents en masse - the idea of a fully scriptable <50ms switch time between documents is quite appealing. AI can help with initial screening, but there are many situations where humans are asked or required to do review at scale.

      • treetalker 6 hours ago ago

        I hate Word but sometimes have to deal with it when I would rather just have plain text. (Among other reasons, Word is notorious for making it difficult to select text to copy and paste, especially when dealing with legal citations and quotations.) Furthermore, the structure of documents is important to understanding them, especially in the law. So it seems like it would be useful to work with the text of the documents without locking horns with M$.

        Scripting uses interest me too. Perhaps pandoc will still be a better option, but I'm also a sucker for TUIs and _Charm projects!

        • albertgoeswoof 3 minutes ago ago

          This is what you’re looking for: https://tritium.legal/

        • w108bmg 6 hours ago ago

          I'm working to improve the copy/paste. Right now, you can copy everything, but not select snippets to copy/paste (ways around this, though). Hopefully have it working in the next week!

      • Eldt 7 hours ago ago

        It doesn't have to be used over SSH, some lawyers might be comfortable using the terminal for local work

    • Tmpod 8 hours ago ago

      Was thinking the same. Might be worth looking into renaming the project, to prevent situations like that for both maintainers and users.

    • nine_k 7 hours ago ago

      The name could rather be docc, along the lines of thicc,

      • Imustaskforhelp 26 minutes ago ago

        Yea I like this one, I feel like they should change the name but maybe that's just my opinion and the author is free to do what they want with the project's name.

        But still doxx feels like it would just get some unwarranted attention when its unnecessary and docc seems a nice enough name too.

        I mean, the project seems fantastic but still the project seems quite new and I don't think that it would suffer anything from a name change.

  • 3eb7988a1663 an hour ago ago

    Can this interact with Track Changes at all? Reviews+Comments? Probably a rat's nest of complexity, but that is something which might interest me every once and a while.

    The other thing which was not obvious - can you extract document metadata and/or hidden text elements?

  • BrouteMinou 6 hours ago ago

    It looks fantastic! That's going into my toolbox that's for sure.

    It's refreshing to see something that isn't another chatbot.

  • Hilift 10 minutes ago ago

    > Working on servers over SSH, I constantly hit Word docs

    What?

  • porridgeraisin an hour ago ago

    Is there no image support? You can use the kitty image protocol or sixel to display them inline no?

  • greazy 8 hours ago ago

    Very cool project. I wish something like this for pdf files.

    • ivanjermakov 8 hours ago ago

      You can always use pandoc to convert pdf to md/plaintext and print it to console.

  • firesteelrain 6 hours ago ago

    Can you use this to basically cat the output and then you can grep the docx?

    pandoc can do this

    • w108bmg 5 hours ago ago

      Maybe? I don't use Pandoc directly (fantastic program, but I only use it thorugh Quarto and Rmarkdown), but something like `doxx document.docx --export text | grep "search term"` should work just like `cat`+`grep`, but with better table structure and no intermediate conversion needed like pandoc.

      • firesteelrain 5 hours ago ago

        With pandoc you can do this I think

        pandoc -t plain file.docx | grep "pattern"

        • koolba 5 hours ago ago

          Even better you can have pandoc output markdown.

  • acedTrex 5 hours ago ago

    > claude.md in the repo

    Very unfortunate

    • btbuildem 4 hours ago ago

      And why is that? Because the logs were not hand-hewn? Source code was not crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of... wherever?

      If you read through that claude.md, it's a well-organized summary of the project, touching on design, architecture, enumerating the functionality implemented so far, future goals, and more. It makes for a pretty great onboarding document for collaborators, tbh.

      Have jetpack, will fly.

      • mikepurvis 4 hours ago ago

        I noticed this too recently, that the copilot instructions I had written up were just as suitable for importing a human.

  • zipping1549 6 hours ago ago

    Great project. I love anything TUI.

    Not so good of a name.

    • goku12 2 hours ago ago

      True on both accounts. Doxxing is a traumatic experience for those who have been at its receiving end. A good project like this shouldn't be marred by a name like that.

    • agnishom 6 hours ago ago
      • w108bmg 5 hours ago ago

        I honestly don't get the name hate? It's 100% intentional wordplay! "Exposing" word documents in the CLI.

        • rafram 3 hours ago ago

          If you keep having to explain why the name isn’t offensive/distasteful, it probably is (at least to a meaningful portion of the population).

        • mionhe 4 hours ago ago

          Doxing is more than exposure. It's exposing someone's real world identity online, often with the intent to harm them. It's the harming portion that I think most people are objecting to. While I doubt most of us have enough online notoriety for us to be targeted in this kind of attack, the idea is still very uncomfortable personally.

        • leptons an hour ago ago

          Out of all the names this could have had, "doxx" is probably the absolute worst. "Wordplay" doesn't excuse bad taste. I'm not sure how many comments about it will convince you of that.

          >"Exposing" word documents in the CLI.

          You're trying way too hard.

        • 16bytes 3 hours ago ago

          It's a very pejorative term that is used with malicious intent. You don't understand why folk find it off-putting?

          What about something like mdocx?

  • pylotlight 4 hours ago ago

    Install from source with git surely cannot be your only deployment plan here?