Browser Makes Tiny Office Suite

There’s a recent craze of people living in tiny houses of 400 square feet down to as little as 80 square feet. Maybe [zserge] was thinking about that and created a very tiny office suite in which each tool weighs in at less than 1K. If you are guessing you couldn’t squeeze much functionality in C or C++ code or even assembly, you’d be right. The language of choice? HTML and JavaScript. So while the code is small, it relies on a pretty big piece of software. On the other hand, you have a browser open right now, so the incremental cost of using these tools is very small.

We get the idea that there’s not much chance this is going to sweep the shelves of Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and all the many competitors. However, it is a pretty stunning example of what you can do with modern HTML. There’s even a GitHub repo.

The text editor is only 63 bytes and can live inside a bookmark in the browser. While it doesn’t actually have the real features of a word processor, you can use Control+B and Control+I to set up bold and italic text. The spreadsheet is a marvel at 741 bytes and really does formulas using the somewhat unsafe eval() function. The functions don’t evaluate until you leave the cell, even if you press enter, so if it seems like it isn’t working, just try clicking in another cell.

For a paltry 410 bytes, there’s a drawing app and presentation module that weighs in at 668 bytes. This last is really just the text editor with some hotkeys to make bullets and headers and the like. There’s a hardcoded limit of 50 slides, but you could change that if you are more verbose.

Saving things can be a bit tricky. You can save as HTML or print using the browser’s native functions. You might have to take a screenshot of the drawing app. Overall, these little apps are a bit tongue-in-cheek, but we have to applaud their function to size ratio.

This project made us think of the JavaScript art project we covered before. We saw a similar technique used to provide serverless websites.