Bento

About

Bento is a local-first office suite built on a simple, slightly radical idea: the document, the editor and the player are the same file. A Bento deck is an ordinary HTML file that carries its own viewer, presenter and editor, with your content stored as readable JSON at the top. You open it in any modern browser, edit it, present it and send it, and the person you send it to needs nothing installed. It is for anyone who is tired of renting their documents from a cloud service, and for people who want to build presentations together with AI assistants. The first app, Bento Slides, is available now; spaces (notes) and dash (sheets and tables) are announced as coming next. What sets it apart is how much it fits into one roughly 700 KB file: real animation, live charts, video and audio, embedded fonts, and end-to-end-encrypted live collaboration. The project is open source under the MIT license and is developed in the open on GitHub, where it gathered thousands of stars within months of its 2026 launch. It is also designed to be edited by AI agents: the format is documented in a public agents.md guide, and there is an installable skill for Claude and other assistants. Highlights: • One self-contained .bento.html file holds the deck, fonts, images, charts and the full editor • Morph transitions animate elements that share an id between slides • Built-in charts (bar, line, pie, scatter) that stay live while you present • End-to-end-encrypted live collaboration (AES-GCM) with a CRDT engine and a blind relay • Read-only copies enforced by cryptographic signatures rather than server permissions • Offline mode that hard-blocks updates and collaboration, with no telemetry • Plain JSON document format that AI assistants and coding agents can edit directly Bento is free, needs no account, and is open source under the MIT license. Because it is a single HTML file, it runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS and beyond, and you can try it online or download the file.

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