VisiData Lightning Demo at PyCascades 2018 [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
In fact, I've been liking it so much that I wrote a tutorial for first-time users: https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/
(Feedback very much welcome / appreciated.)
The lightning talk is a really great sales pitch, but it's unclear how to actually replicate it. Another video of his, a recommended one after the lightning talk, again loses me a little and goes very fast. I could pause and try to understand... but it's not just about how to do it, but also about knowing that I should be looking to do certain things in the first place.
Your tutorial both gives a nice overview of what features exist, and explains very clearly how to do things. Thanks for taking the time!
Thats all I needed to hear.
Some hand-holding and guiding is very welcome... so thanks!
For everyone who hasn't watched it yet, from what I can tell, this is a clip of someone using a terminal tool they've made for hacking around with tablular data. It looks awesome for exploring data in a partially visual way, driven by commands. I'll often end up doing a bunch of stuff like he demonstrates directly in python — pull out the data, filter, find patterns, calculate new columns. You could probably do much of that with Pandas, but this definitely looks like it would be worth a play.
For others who usually skip videos, here is a link which skips the intro, getting your time investment to under 4 minutes:
That was an odd choice considering everything is moving the other way as a standard. I wonder what the authors reasoning behind this decision was.
It's an immediate 'close tab' motion for a lot of people.
Cut that part out and you'll have a lot more eyeballs on your product.
How does VisiData compare to them?
Is Windows version somewhat on the roadmap? E.g. For mingw-bash or cygwin?
If working on a remote machine were really an issue, you'd just mount the remote filesystem or something. That's a small convenience but not a real reason.
That you're already coding in a terminal, didn't disable alt-tab.
Spreadsheets (or to use the brand name, Excel) have a very different focus. You speak as if spreadsheets are just as good as, in this case, Visidata, but the whole point is that this is better. Else, why bother developing and using it? You can indeed just open up your favorite spreadsheet processor.
I think the real reason is that it's universal and convenient. You can use the multitasking features of your favorite shell, and it attracts a certain audience which indeed wants vim-style hotkeys and shortcuts. It also doesn't need a platform to create GUIs on top of, like Electron.