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See also: https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/

by jwiz 3y ago

mistaken 3y ago
visidata is awesome. It also supports a bunch of other file formats such as excel sheets.
standing_user 3y ago
Didn't know about it, thank you
rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> Scatterplots in the terminal Wow!
jellyfishbeaver 3y ago
Strongly considering donating to the creator of Visidata, it's one of the terminal tools I can't live without. I use it every day.
- bbkane 3y ago
  If it's that important and you can afford a few bucks a month, I strongly urge you stop considering your donation, and (right now) follow the links on the GitHub to actually start supporting the project. It's really easy to wallow in the "considering" phase of a decision indefinitely (or maybe that's just me :D)
- letmeinhere 3y ago
  huh, something (maybe similarity to VisiCalc name) had me dismissing it as commercial software
- jwiz 3y ago
  Yep, I am doing the $5/mo Patreon level because I love it so much.
zoogeny 3y ago
I've been thinking about a terminal spreadsheet editor for about a year now. I haven't deeply investigated this tool while I write this comment but I'd love for something like this for Terminal that supported `=A1+B2` kind of formulas.
- runjake 3y ago
  Back in the day, we called this Lotus 123 and VisiCalc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
  - zoogeny 3y ago
    Yes, exactly - imagine a modern version written in Rust, with vi key-bindings, etc. Please someone be inspired by this idea and build this. TUIs are making a comeback and the spreadsheet is still one of the most useful and effective tools in all information science.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    The spreadsheet data model lives a double life. (1) On one hand you can use it for data that is really tabular, (2) But it also has an engine that can compute the dependency relationships between cells and recalculate the cells affected by a change. This is quite different from conventional programming languages where you are required to specify an order to put operations in. Of course this a problem for exploiting parallelism but I'd charge it is one more bit of cognitive load that makes it harder for beginners and non-professional programmers. (Professional programmers are just used to it and only run into problems in unusual cases where circularity is involved, but I think it's one more thing that beginners struggle with.) The worst problem is a lack of separation between code and data. If you are doing an analysis you might put something like =SUM(A1:A28) in A30. Excel will change that to =SUM(A1:A29) if you insert a row in there, which helps, but they lock you into the mindset of "I'm making the December sales report" as opposed to "I'm making the monthly sales report". That is, the data and the analysis should be two separate things: just as you can put the December data or the January data into a Python script. (Note some of the same problems still exist with "notebooks" and "workspaces" where you wind up with a file that has both code and data in it which can be problematic to check into git, particularly when your are working for people who would like to have a beautiful notebook with an analysis in it to view in GitHub but will then struggle to version control it. Many "data scientists" fail to rise above the December sales report even though there's a clear path to turn a Jupyter notebook into a Python script.) --- As much as that is a rant I think there's a huge untapped market for things that are like spreadsheets but different. That is, something that looks like Excel but is specialized for editing tabular data (no formulas, CSV import 'just works' all the time, ...) or something that has formulas like Excel but not on a grid or not just on a grid. For the latter there was this product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver which is still around. People were amazed with TK Solver when it came out and I'm surprised to this day that it hasn't had a lot of competition.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
somat 3y ago
Can confirm, I consider visidata to be the gold standard for data exploration. I have largely given up on spreadsheets, replacing them with relational databases. And on top of being a world class tool for understanding the data for import, visidata makes for a pretty great query pager.
retrochameleon 3y ago
I've been using Visidata and love it for viewing, extracting rows or columns to a different file, but I know it is capable of much more that I haven't figured out yet

See also: https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/

by jwiz 3y ago

See also: https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/

mistaken 3y ago

visidata is awesome. It also supports a bunch of other file formats such as excel sheets.

standing_user 3y ago

Didn't know about it, thank you

rrr_oh_man 3y ago

> Scatterplots in the terminal Wow!

jellyfishbeaver 3y ago

Strongly considering donating to the creator of Visidata, it's one of the terminal tools I can't live without. I use it every day.

bbkane 3y ago
If it's that important and you can afford a few bucks a month, I strongly urge you stop considering your donation, and (right now) follow the links on the GitHub to actually start supporting the project. It's really easy to wallow in the "considering" phase of a decision indefinitely (or maybe that's just me :D)
letmeinhere 3y ago
huh, something (maybe similarity to VisiCalc name) had me dismissing it as commercial software
jwiz 3y ago
Yep, I am doing the $5/mo Patreon level because I love it so much.

zoogeny 3y ago

I've been thinking about a terminal spreadsheet editor for about a year now. I haven't deeply investigated this tool while I write this comment but I'd love for something like this for Terminal that supported `=A1+B2` kind of formulas.

runjake 3y ago
Back in the day, we called this Lotus 123 and VisiCalc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
- zoogeny 3y ago
  Yes, exactly - imagine a modern version written in Rust, with vi key-bindings, etc. Please someone be inspired by this idea and build this. TUIs are making a comeback and the spreadsheet is still one of the most useful and effective tools in all information science.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  The spreadsheet data model lives a double life. (1) On one hand you can use it for data that is really tabular, (2) But it also has an engine that can compute the dependency relationships between cells and recalculate the cells affected by a change. This is quite different from conventional programming languages where you are required to specify an order to put operations in. Of course this a problem for exploiting parallelism but I'd charge it is one more bit of cognitive load that makes it harder for beginners and non-professional programmers. (Professional programmers are just used to it and only run into problems in unusual cases where circularity is involved, but I think it's one more thing that beginners struggle with.) The worst problem is a lack of separation between code and data. If you are doing an analysis you might put something like =SUM(A1:A28) in A30. Excel will change that to =SUM(A1:A29) if you insert a row in there, which helps, but they lock you into the mindset of "I'm making the December sales report" as opposed to "I'm making the monthly sales report". That is, the data and the analysis should be two separate things: just as you can put the December data or the January data into a Python script. (Note some of the same problems still exist with "notebooks" and "workspaces" where you wind up with a file that has both code and data in it which can be problematic to check into git, particularly when your are working for people who would like to have a beautiful notebook with an analysis in it to view in GitHub but will then struggle to version control it. Many "data scientists" fail to rise above the December sales report even though there's a clear path to turn a Jupyter notebook into a Python script.) --- As much as that is a rant I think there's a huge untapped market for things that are like spreadsheets but different. That is, something that looks like Excel but is specialized for editing tabular data (no formulas, CSV import 'just works' all the time, ...) or something that has formulas like Excel but not on a grid or not just on a grid. For the latter there was this product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver which is still around. People were amazed with TK Solver when it came out and I'm surprised to this day that it hasn't had a lot of competition.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

somat 3y ago

Can confirm, I consider visidata to be the gold standard for data exploration. I have largely given up on spreadsheets, replacing them with relational databases. And on top of being a world class tool for understanding the data for import, visidata makes for a pretty great query pager.

retrochameleon 3y ago

I've been using Visidata and love it for viewing, extracting rows or columns to a different file, but I know it is capable of much more that I haven't figured out yet