4 ms·

L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

92 points by duane1024 5mo ago

create_accounts 5mo ago
It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?
- duane1024 5mo ago
  I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!
  - gerdesj 5mo ago
    I still have an original cardboard strip with the function key codes on it somewhere. Ctrl-F9 ... font (I think, it was rather a long time ago).
  - somat 5mo ago
    Reveal Codes is a good start, but if I remember correctly they were read only. you could not close the loop and enter codes. Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no consistent style. one night I sat down with it and thanks to reveal codes I was able to clean it up. At which point I had a revelation, most of the sins of the document were due to the WYSIWYG interface. I was able to fix it because I could(almost) see the source. Why not cut the middleman write the document in source and render it to the final form. So I rewrote it in html. and have had a lingering resentment of word processors ever since. You know why they call them word processors right?... Ever see what a food processor does to food?
    - devilbunny 5mo ago
      Ami Pro 3.1 was WYSIWYG with reveal codes. You could move the tags around, though I don't recall if you could enter them directly. Also happened to have the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've ever used. Not the most stable software in the world, but I loved it. It made writing lab reports as a chemistry major so much simpler (especially combined with ChemDraw).
  - kstrauser 5mo ago
    WP5.1 gave me some fun times. I was in the Navy and transferred to a school with a month or so to kill before class started. They dropped me into a data processing office as something to do while I waited. The job was easy: read a file off a floppy, put it into the right format in WP, print it, and repeat. I discovered WP’s macro language and automated my way into a cushy job: instead of the 16 reports a day we were suppose to process, I could do about 20 an hour. My boss was impressed, thanked me profusely, and told me to STFU about it. We’d come to work in the morning and knock out the day’s work in an hour, piddle around until lunch, then go home and enjoy the San Diego weather for the rest of the day. That was a pretty terrific couple of months.
  - kcartlidge 5mo ago
    If asked, I often name WordPerfect 4.2 as the best software I ever used. And that it was written in assembly is incredible. The book Almost Perfect [1] details those early times at WordPerfect. Incidentally, amongst the other best software I'd be tempted by Lotus 123, DataEase 4.53, Turbo Pascal 3, and Elite (BBC). [1] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml
- bitwize 5mo ago
  Yes, if you use a formatter like LaTeX. The beauty part is, "Reveal Codes" is always on!
  - manithree 5mo ago
    As a big fan of WordPerfect on my first DOS machine (286 clone), I agree. I respect authors like GRRM for sticking with WordStar, but whenever I get nostalgic and wondering about WordPerfect in DosBox, I remember I use emacs and typst. All the good things about WordPerfect, but vastly superior.
    - bitwize 5mo ago
      I keep seeing ads for expensive "writerdecks" that run between $500 and $1200 and have a bare-minimum OS that is intended for distraction-free writing. I keep wondering how these are any better than an old laptop, FreeDOS, and WordPerfect 5.2, except as Veblen goods.
- bananapub 5mo ago
  https://github.com/taviso/wpunix https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
- LeoPanthera 5mo ago
  Wordgrinder. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
recsv-heredoc 5mo ago
I can highly suggest visidata! https://www.visidata.org https://www.visidata.org It's an incredibly useful piece of software for data wrangling and exploration.
easygenes 5mo ago
Very early in my career I made friends with the business’s sole Lotus Notes administrator, "the email server guy." He was pretty proud of what it could do, and I sometimes get nostalgic for the admin UI.
tswq 5mo ago
Doesn't seem as useful as visidata. Will check out though! Looks like a fun weekend project :)
- CTOSian 5mo ago
  yea visidata light years , I still use 123R2 runs fine under msdos runner - old version I know but I have a hack of addins :} as for that project .. well not even windows binaries there
nhatcher 5mo ago
Cool to see this here! There are quite a few other terminal based spreadsheet people have been doing over the last few years. Most notably: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im Has been in HN often, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658 New takes: https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/garritfra/cell https://github.com/garritfra/cell
LeoPanthera 5mo ago
See also Wordgrinder, a text-mode word processor. (As distinct from a text editor.) https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
bb88 5mo ago
I remember being a teenager and building forms using the Lotus 123 WYSIWYG graphics.
taviso 5mo ago
Hey, another 1-2-3 nerd :) I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf https://github.com/taviso/123elf I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e). It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly. I wrote a display driver to make that work a little better: https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv
- duane1024 5mo ago
  I love your pages, they are really great, especially the one about reverse engineering the display driver to discover that 1-2-3 actually supports better display resolutions. I've been running the DOS version in DosBox-X for Mac at the moment to ground l123 in the reality of what using 1-2-3 was like. I'm using Release 3.4a, which was the last version that didn't go full GUI (R4 for DOS was kind of a Windows-light version). I'm trying to balance fidelity to the original with something that might be useful to actually do some productive work in, especially when one might not need or want the full GUI/overhead of Excel or (shudder) Google Sheets.
marlburrow 5mo ago
[dead]
karunamurti 5mo ago
I took Lotus 1-2-3 course along with Wordstar and dBase when I was in elementary school. Good times.

92 points by duane1024 5mo ago

It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?

duane1024 5mo ago
I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!
- gerdesj 5mo ago
  I still have an original cardboard strip with the function key codes on it somewhere. Ctrl-F9 ... font (I think, it was rather a long time ago).
- somat 5mo ago
  Reveal Codes is a good start, but if I remember correctly they were read only. you could not close the loop and enter codes. Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no consistent style. one night I sat down with it and thanks to reveal codes I was able to clean it up. At which point I had a revelation, most of the sins of the document were due to the WYSIWYG interface. I was able to fix it because I could(almost) see the source. Why not cut the middleman write the document in source and render it to the final form. So I rewrote it in html. and have had a lingering resentment of word processors ever since. You know why they call them word processors right?... Ever see what a food processor does to food?
  - devilbunny 5mo ago
    Ami Pro 3.1 was WYSIWYG with reveal codes. You could move the tags around, though I don't recall if you could enter them directly. Also happened to have the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've ever used. Not the most stable software in the world, but I loved it. It made writing lab reports as a chemistry major so much simpler (especially combined with ChemDraw).
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  WP5.1 gave me some fun times. I was in the Navy and transferred to a school with a month or so to kill before class started. They dropped me into a data processing office as something to do while I waited. The job was easy: read a file off a floppy, put it into the right format in WP, print it, and repeat. I discovered WP’s macro language and automated my way into a cushy job: instead of the 16 reports a day we were suppose to process, I could do about 20 an hour. My boss was impressed, thanked me profusely, and told me to STFU about it. We’d come to work in the morning and knock out the day’s work in an hour, piddle around until lunch, then go home and enjoy the San Diego weather for the rest of the day. That was a pretty terrific couple of months.
- kcartlidge 5mo ago
  If asked, I often name WordPerfect 4.2 as the best software I ever used. And that it was written in assembly is incredible. The book Almost Perfect [1] details those early times at WordPerfect. Incidentally, amongst the other best software I'd be tempted by Lotus 123, DataEase 4.53, Turbo Pascal 3, and Elite (BBC). [1] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml
bitwize 5mo ago
Yes, if you use a formatter like LaTeX. The beauty part is, "Reveal Codes" is always on!
- manithree 5mo ago
  As a big fan of WordPerfect on my first DOS machine (286 clone), I agree. I respect authors like GRRM for sticking with WordStar, but whenever I get nostalgic and wondering about WordPerfect in DosBox, I remember I use emacs and typst. All the good things about WordPerfect, but vastly superior.
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    I keep seeing ads for expensive "writerdecks" that run between $500 and $1200 and have a bare-minimum OS that is intended for distraction-free writing. I keep wondering how these are any better than an old laptop, FreeDOS, and WordPerfect 5.2, except as Veblen goods.
bananapub 5mo ago
https://github.com/taviso/wpunix https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
LeoPanthera 5mo ago
Wordgrinder. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

recsv-heredoc 5mo ago

I can highly suggest visidata! https://www.visidata.org https://www.visidata.org It's an incredibly useful piece of software for data wrangling and exploration.

easygenes 5mo ago

Very early in my career I made friends with the business’s sole Lotus Notes administrator, "the email server guy." He was pretty proud of what it could do, and I sometimes get nostalgic for the admin UI.

tswq 5mo ago

Doesn't seem as useful as visidata. Will check out though! Looks like a fun weekend project :)

CTOSian 5mo ago
yea visidata light years , I still use 123R2 runs fine under msdos runner - old version I know but I have a hack of addins :} as for that project .. well not even windows binaries there

nhatcher 5mo ago

Cool to see this here! There are quite a few other terminal based spreadsheet people have been doing over the last few years. Most notably: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im Has been in HN often, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658 New takes: https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/garritfra/cell https://github.com/garritfra/cell

LeoPanthera 5mo ago

See also Wordgrinder, a text-mode word processor. (As distinct from a text editor.) https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

bb88 5mo ago

I remember being a teenager and building forms using the Lotus 123 WYSIWYG graphics.

taviso 5mo ago

Hey, another 1-2-3 nerd :) I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf https://github.com/taviso/123elf I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e). It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly. I wrote a display driver to make that work a little better: https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv

duane1024 5mo ago
I love your pages, they are really great, especially the one about reverse engineering the display driver to discover that 1-2-3 actually supports better display resolutions. I've been running the DOS version in DosBox-X for Mac at the moment to ground l123 in the reality of what using 1-2-3 was like. I'm using Release 3.4a, which was the last version that didn't go full GUI (R4 for DOS was kind of a Windows-light version). I'm trying to balance fidelity to the original with something that might be useful to actually do some productive work in, especially when one might not need or want the full GUI/overhead of Excel or (shudder) Google Sheets.

marlburrow 5mo ago

[dead]

karunamurti 5mo ago

I took Lotus 1-2-3 course along with Wordstar and dBase when I was in elementary school. Good times.