VisiData in 60 Seconds | Hacker News Reader

VisiData in 60 Seconds

jsvine.github.io

112 pointsluu15 comments

Wow, the project homepage has a great dynamic command-line generator that lets you specify what you are trying to do. This may exist elsewhere, but it's the first time I've seen it and I hope to see it on more projects! https://www.visidata.org/

I've been living in vd for the last few months for data analysis. It's been beyond helpful, including for examining ugly nested JSON data. It's been extremely valuable for feature exploration in my dataset.

Yes, vd does a nice job on JSON data. To open nested data you can use the expand-col (keyboard shortcut "(") command, and the unfurl-col "zM" command.

You can also use the pyobj-cell "z^Y" command to explore single cell as a table. A single cell can be a whole nested part of your JSON data.

Also, the transpose "t" command is useful when working with JSON that is an object with a lot of keys.

whoa, thanks, didn't know about json support, super useful!

Looks like it can save to sqlite? Seems like a very good companion in that case. I often analyze csv files in sqlite but importing data to it can sometimes be a bit of work. If I can use VisiData as an intermediary step, it seems very useful. Also looks powerful in it's own right.

Not sure about saving but, more importantly for me, it can read sqlite DBs, which has been a godsend whenever I need to take a quick glance at some random DB just to see what kind of tables it holds and what does the data look like. I know my SELECTs but I can't, for the life of me, remember what are the commands to check schemas and DB metadata on sqlite ("Was it .describe? Maybe .schema? Or perhaps \t? Gah, let's check the help once again..."), so knowing that visidata gets me there much faster feels good.

> Also looks powerful in it's own right

If you aren't convinced of that yet, I'd simply suggest to take a look at this lightning demo (~5 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

I just confirmed while testing vd, it does save to sqlite (select cols/rows, ctrl-s to save, name your file something.sqlite, done!) That's really awesome.

I might write a plugin [0] to load logged FIX [1] messages (an ascii-based, industry standard format for communicating financial transactions)

[0] https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/advanced/extendin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange

Hey, VisiData author here! If you do want to make a FIX loader (or any plugin), you can come chat with us on Freenode #visidata and we'd love to help. A straightforward row-based file format should be quite straightforward to make a loader for!

Thanks a lot! I look forward to that. Congrats on such a great tool

vd is so useful for browsing sqlite, csv, parquet, etc data. I just wish I used it often enough to remember how to use all the advanced features like selecting column and row subsets

Anyone know what terminal font they’re using here?

Roboto Mono and they're not screenshots.

> and they're not screenshots

That over there blew my mind, and I had to go back to the page to double-check that. And indeed, it's all clever CSS trickery. Digging further into the source, I found that this was generated using the ansi2html [1] library which I had never heard about before. Thanks for the TIL!

[1] https://github.com/pycontribs/ansi2html

The more I learn about VisiData, the more I like it! It is a fantastically useful tool!

This is great, thanks for sharing it! In the last week I searched for (a) a table-view UI for rec files, and (b) a text-file based spreadsheet program allowing simple formulas. Now I get both of those from a single HN post!

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