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Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

I like this idea. I don't think it would be jarring if the read-ahead buffer was a minimal number of lines, i.e. looking like distinct pages. The default could be at least the line height of the terminal, or some multiple.

There could be an option to redisplay the header row for resized "pages".

There could be a CLI switch giving the user control, i.e. make everyone happy.

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I think data scientists will recognize this problem, and there's a well-used solution: .head()

Just show me the top 5 rows. That's all most people are looking for.

cat data/a.csv | tv --head

Or:

    head -n5 data/a.csv | tv

Unless your csv has embedded line breaks

Can you give an example of what you mean? If it breaks tv then I would like to add it to the automated tests and see if we can work on it.

No sorry, I assume tv is fine. The problem is in assuming `head -n5` gives you 5 rows and piping that into tv.

Oo I see. Thanks for clarifying.

If tv works with embedded EOLs, you can do this:

  cat data/a.csv | tv | head -n5

It is more resource intensive, but it pushes the problem you mentioned onto tv. If tv doesn't work with embedded EOLs, then you need to fix your data or fix your tool.

> Just show me the top 5 rows. That's all most people are looking for.

Is it? I'd wager that can't be more than half its use at most. Accessing a specific section that could be at any section of the file is very common in my experience, as is truly random access. Both of these, as well as the first few rows use case, are far better served by a page system.

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