Show HN: TablePad, a notepad app for structured data

Everyone uses spreadsheets to manage small-scale tabular data because unlike a database they're usable by humans and let users immediately start entering data, but they’re not great at “staying out of your way”, in that you constantly have to resize columns to match the data width, style the header row separately and freeze it, maybe add a row count column, remember to sort columns in such a way that row integrity is preserved, etc. Doing that stuff drives me crazy. Also, launching a giant office application to manage a list of a couple dozen items feels silly. Or doing something in the cloud. It feels simultaneously like massive overkill yet still not having the right tool for the job, like using a Ferrari to haul lumber.

So out of pent-up frustration I built a simple free desktop app for editing tables that lets you just start typing like a spreadsheet, but actually knows what a table is and tries really hard to stay out of your way. So you can just edit your table rather than spending your time teaching an automatic infinite ledger how to be a tabular notepad. I’ve enjoyed having it in my toolbox so I thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone else finds it useful.

In the spirit of Show HN, this project is somewhere between a prototype and an MVP; there are obvious major missing features but it’s actively used by enough people that the quality isn’t terrible. If you have a use case for which you think TablePad is a good fit, I'd love to hear about it in the comments or you can email me at seth@tablepad.app.

Features to consider: 1) F2 for editing cell contents 2) tab behavior like Excel where pressing tab on last column wraps to the next line+first column 3) C-; to enter current date.

I did get this error when trying to save or save as on Linux.

https://i.imgur.com/0VmWKGw.png

I was using file name: "New Table". I did not enter a file extension. I'm not sure what extension TablePad uses.